EMail Features That Deserve To Die

"Reply All" warning • mozillaZine Forums. Have you ever replied to an email message, and wondered whether its contents went somewhere that you didn't intend? Lawyers particularly need to be careful what they say in emails, and whom they say it to. Hitting Reply All can send sensitive information to the wrong people. Why not just kill the thing in the first place? Then, if you send an email to someone, it will be because you took the time to enter the email address or pulled it from your Contact list on purpose. In Thunderbird, you can do this by using the Customize feature of the Tool Bar. Right click, delete, and you are already safer. Look around in your email client, and I bet there is a way to get rid of the Reply All button there as well.

Comments

[Timmy Two]

After reading the title, I anticipated something a bit more insightful. While the problems that come from a misclick of "reply all" are often numerous, the solution should not be to eliminate the feature outright. The increasing amount of complexity in our gadgets suggests that we should be able to find an alternative that both maintains the usefulness of the feature (i.e. timesaving) and reduces the chance of error. Perhaps a simple confirmation dialogue asking "did you -really- mean everyone, or just some people?" would suffice, or a way to retract sent emails (less enticing). Whatever the method, a bit more commentary (and less kneejerk) would have been nice here.

Conversely, kudos for probing the surface of an all-too-common problem.

Cheers!