Of all the basic email functions that people have a habit of abusing, replying all is the worst. Reply-all threads are hell — disruptive, performative wastes of time. If you are on a thread with more than ten people and you reply-all, you are a criminal.
Reply-all hell reached new depths last week when 90,000 Wells Fargo staffers received an email, and some people — incompetent, monstrous, or both — ended up replying all. At one point, according to the Charlotte Observer, “[t]he bank’s servers had a backlog of 4 million email messages to process.”
That backlog caused a few delays on internal and external email exchanges, and some bank departments had trouble completing transactions. The issue was described by the bank — the third-largest in the U.S.— as “minor technical difficulties” by a spokesperson, who added that there were “no compliance or security issues.” Just a ton of email.
