@ludicity I have a fun email story

back in 2011, I had a temp job in a hospital - they were doing a big-bang changeover of the entire hospital IT system. I was one of eighty "floorwalkers", who'd be stationed around the wards and clinics ready to immediately step in to guide and troubleshoot and escalate issues, and ensure minimal interruption to patient care

we had about a month to prepare before go-live, during which time we would attend whatever classroom training had a spare PC, carry out self-directed learning in the test system with the business change flowcharts, and do various chores for the IT department (like sitting in a shipping container, assembling multiple dozen individually-packaged medical tablet PCs)

there were also some trainers, a couple dozen business analysts, some permanent IT folks, and other stakeholders attached to the project... which was led by a single project manager, Jean. about 110 people in all

the project had an email list consisting of an Exchange account set up with forwarding rules to send any email it received to all 110 people. you can't set a rule to redirect to more than 32 addresses so there were eight rules for various cohorts of people in the project - I was in the "week 3 floorwalker intake" cohort

but because it _forwarded_ the emails, if you reply to a message, you reply to the group address, not the sender, so reply = reply-all unless you manually replace the To address in your reply. at least once a day someone would forget to do this, and everyone was irritated by the system

one day, after I'd been there about three weeks, I crashed a training session for radiologists, in a classroom with about eight PCs for students plus one for the presenter over in the corner. the trainer and the radiologists were using the student PCs, so I took the presenter PC, and quickly zoned out as they went through basic functionality at a rate of about one UI interaction per minute

I had admin access over the group email account (we all did, for some reason) so turned my mind to the daily email storm problem. some investigation and testing revealed if the Exchange rules were set to Redirect instead of Forward, when you reply you do just reply to the sender! bosh, replaced the eight Forward To Cohort rules with eight Redirect To Cohort rules... problem solved!

except... now when Jean sends an email to the group, it looks like she's sent it just to you and your cohort... which is potentially confusing. how to remove that ambiguity..? oh yes! add the group email address to each of the eight cohorts, along with a clause NOT to redirect email FROM the group address! bit clumsy but an email from Jean to the ten Business Change folks plus the project group... they'll understand

I was very pleased with this, and the radiologists were wrapping up, so I logged out and went off to recongregate at the daily 3pm standup in the old manor house that was now for IT training, all eighty floorwalkers plus some of the others

Jean asked: did you all get the update I sent fifteen minutes ago?

Sam replied: is that the one you sent thirteen hundred times

at which point my face went bright red

The email went out I think 4,096 times to each of the 110 staff until the mail server crashed

I was sent to the IT department to manually delete them from everyone's inboxes. there was no official disciplinary action, but my changes were completely reverted and I was "the email guy" after that

I kept my job, and the go-live went relatively smoothly. I and many colleagues got head-hunted to implement the same system at another hospital months later. They were in many ways the most satisfying jobs I've had... although the contemptuously poor UI of the software enraged me

I don't know if it would've been better or worse if I'd followed the impulse to, just before leaving the radiologists, drop a quick email to the group: "hey folks, I've made a couple of tweaks, you won't get so much unwanted email from the group address from now on"...