Don’t Reply to a Message with Many Recipients Unless a Reply is Clearly Expected or You Have Something to Contribute

Some messages to large groups of people require a response from everyone. “Please let me know if Wednesday or Thursday works better for you,” for example. Others are clearly fishing expeditions for information and don’t require a response from all the people on the distribution list. “Has anyone seen my red stapler?” would be such a message. But there are some people out there who don’t seem to understand the difference and will reply to every single email they receive. I’m talking about the people who get a broadcast email that was sent to large number of people with a question like “does anyone know a good divorce lawyer in Las Vegas?” and feel obligated to hit Reply to All and respond with an answer like “No.” Maybe they do this to make themselves feel relevant or useful, but there’s no excuse for generating meaningless email. These people are one of the reasons why our email inboxes are full of junk and why so many of us have a hard time focusing on the messages that really are important. They must be stopped.

The first step in making sure you don’t commit such crimes is to take a second to think about whether a reply is really expected. If a message is addressed just to you it’s likely that you’re expected to respond. And of course you need to reply when someone directs a question at you personally. But the more people who are on the distribution list the less likely it is that you’re required to chime in or do anything. When you do have something to contribute the best approach is often to simply reply to the sender of the original message rather than inundating an entire group with information they don’t need. The organizer of a meeting may need to know that you aren’t available on Thursday because you’re going to your chiropractor, but everyone on the attendee list doesn’t. And it’s almost never a good idea to use Reply to All when you change the topic of discussion-- especially when you change it to something personal. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen Listserve discussions go bad when one person sends out a perfectly businesslike question to a large group of people and one of them replies to everyone with something like “Hi, how have you been? I haven’t talked to you since your husband left and you went into rehab! Did you run into Britney there?” Distribution lists and Listserves make the Reply to All button especially dangerous because it’s easy to forget how many people are included in them.