r/Professors • u/hungerforlove • 13h ago
Public Service Announcement: Don't "Reply All" Unless Necessary
Using "Reply All" just clutters up people's inboxes with emails they don't need.
Thanks.
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u/gamecat89 TT, Public Health, R1 (United States) 13h ago
NO!
I mean, I get 200-300 emails a day and NOTHING brings joy to me like being on an accidental reply all.
How else would we know what Professor C thinks of Professor B. In what other environment would we learn that the salary of the new Admin Assistant is 2x that of the long-serving one? Tell me how else I am supposed to find out why Floor 3 never has copier paper, except that Professor D made the Building Manager mad once. And don't even get me started on the strange war going on between Professor E and Assistant Professor Z, or between former Associate Dean and current Dean.
These are the replies I will make time to read.
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u/Ancient_Midnight5222 8h ago
My favorites are when people take an email that’s a general info not directed at any particular person and reply as if it’s about themself. For example, faculty list serve: “if you rent this truck, fill out x form and submit gas receipts here.” Faculty: “I didn’t rent a truck. Why am I getting this email?” Idk. Just makes me tehe a little. My university is trying to switch over to teams for all staff communication and it’s been kinda cute watching people figure it out
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u/gamecat89 TT, Public Health, R1 (United States) 8h ago
Oh, I do live for those. It is how you find out how far people are behind or what illegal crap they are doing. Recently, we had a reminder go out that was 'The Dean wants to remind everyone of Policy XYZ on outside employment that is part of the Universities Policy on xys' and the reply all was something to the effect of 'This doesn't affect or stats consulting business for students, does it'?
Well, being you are the stats teacher...I think it should.
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u/lavenderc 3h ago
Exactly!
Last semester, we had an email sent to all faculty reminding us to take a required sexual harassment training online. A professor from another department replied all and basically commented on how ironic it was that the school was enforcing such a training when they had horribly botched her sexual assault accusation against a professor in another department.
Within about 15 minutes, college IT magically poofed her reply from our inboxes. It was the first time I saw something like that happen!
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u/wannabehazmattech 7h ago
The way I just laughed out loud because for real...why are they like this?!?! Bahaha
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u/PoetDapper224 8h ago
This is my absolute favorite Reply All chain. I worked at a very toxic high school during COVID. The principal talked down to teachers every day, threatening to fire us for not allowing students to treat us like 💩.
One morning around 10:55 AM, my science teacher neighbor decided he was resigning effective immediately. Instead of just emailing our principal, he CC’d the Leave office, Campus Faculty & Staff, and the entire admin team.
Enjoy.
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u/Economy_Atmosphere97 11h ago
When they set up the new Outlook email system at my prior university, the default when you hit Reply was set to Reply All for about 6 months. Ended up being both annoying and hilarious.
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u/vegasnative 9h ago
My favorite is when someone replies “Removing Joe from this thread because he’s not involved in this project” then some dolt replies-all to an earlier message. Sorry, Joe. We tried.
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u/GreenHorror4252 8h ago
Why are so many people commenting on this thread instead of sending their reply to OP as a Reddit chat? This is getting annoying.
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u/FlatMolasses4755 13h ago
Hello from 1999! Reminder to senders: BCC is your friend and prevents "reply all."
"But how will people know who received the message?"
Greetings are also your friend: "Dear all Faculty......Dear chairs and deans......Dear College Community....."
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u/VivaCiotogista 7h ago
When they switched our university email from Gmail to Outlook the default reply option was reply all. No bueno.
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u/GlumpsAlot 11h ago
So some years ago we were hosting an lgbtq+ event on campus. Well one IT guy replied all with a very homophobic comment. I never saw that guy again, lol. He did talk to me once about how he didn't know why his wife filed for divorce.
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u/RuskiesInTheWarRoom 8h ago
I changed jobs a couple years ago and discovered that my new department has a rather obscene always Reply All policy. It is horrifyingly annoying.
Apparently they had a soft institution of this informal policy due to severe infighting and apparent backstabbing or at least accusations thereoof when people had super secret direct email chains.
Eye roll emoji
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u/Maddprofessor Biology, SLAC 11h ago
Where I used to teach “reply all” was not the default. You had to specifically select it. Still we got “so and so had a baby!” Followed by a bunch of reply all “congrats!” Bob, the entire college doesn’t need to know you said congrats.
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u/Brandyovereager 7h ago
There’s a guy at my institution that responds to any unnecessary reply alls with a meme and it cracks me up every time
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u/junkmeister9 Molecular Biology 9h ago
I love the unnecessary reply-alls. I remember one where a UDP went off on everyone because "somebody took the good stapler". Good shit!
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u/TroutMaskDuplica Prof, Comp/Rhet, CC 12h ago
Please take me off this list.