Please don't respond to the entire mailing list

Anne-Wil Harzing - Fri 21 Oct 2016 09:34 (updated Sun 6 Sep 2020 23:33)

There are many occasions when you receive an email where you are only one addressee of many, requesting your attendance, the submission of something, or just providing you with information. This could be an email to an interest group, a mailing list, but also to staff members of your department or university. Be very careful when you respond to these emails and make sure that, unless your email contains substantive information that is important to people beyond the sender, you only respond to the original sender.

Careful with the reply-to-all button!

Too many academics just hit the “reply-to-all” button indiscriminately. Most of the time this “only” causes some annoyance to the other hundred (thousand?) people on the mailing list, aggravated when more than one person makes the same mistake. Sometimes however the effect might be more serious:

1. Do you really want your whole department to know that you have a doctor’s appointment, your dog has died, or you are at home waiting for the plumber?
2. Worse still, do you want the whole university to enjoy the quip to the sender about the great time you had in the pub the other night.
3. Or more practically, would you enjoy having to create a new exam because sending it to your entire department instead of the department’s administrator had made it invalid.

Update 14 November 2016: A perfect illustration of the chaos that can ensue in large organizations is the estimated 186 million needless emails that led to a crash of the NHS email system.

Recalling the message makes it worse

And yes… you can “recall” an email to the entire list. But this:

1. Annoys everyone not just once, but twice.
2. Might actually make them more likely to check what that response was that you were so eager for them not to see :-)

Be careful with autocomplete too

A variant of this type of embarrassment is the autocomplete in your address field. You might end up sending your confirmation for a job interview at another university to your current Dean. That might well be a conscious ploy for attention, but if it is not, look at the addressee three times before you send an email. And if there are too many men called David in your address book, either disable the autocomplete or think of new aliases in your address book for the most important ones.

Related blogposts

• How to address other academics by email?
• Don't write mass emails (1): distributing your work
• How to address your lecturer?
• Don't write mass emails (2): asking for help