Technology can be confusing, but if there's one thing that everyone in the workforce should know, it's how to reply to an email. It's shocking how often people hit "Reply All" without realizing the importance of the "All" part. This is how massive email chains get created by accident, leading to misunderstandings, distractions, and even firings.
These people witnessed some of the most cringy "Reply All" mistakes of all time!
(Content has been edited for clarity)
Talk Dirty To Me
“Two of the partners at my old firm were having a not-very-discreet affair (both were married to other people). Partner A was in charge of the summer associate program and sent an email around the firm with information on the summer interns — names, schools, etc. — and who would be mentors for who, dates of events, etc.
Partner B replied all — to a 500+ person law firm, attorneys, paralegals, secretaries, everybody — ‘I’m going to pork you so hard later.’
It was hilarious for several reasons, including his ultra-seductive use of the word ‘pork.'”
Once It Starts, You Can’t Stop It
“I worked at a large Fortune 100 company (70,000 employees) a few years back. The CEO sent out an email to ‘All Users,’ and then some idiot ‘Replies All’ with a comment.
The chain reaction of dimwits all clicking ‘Reply All’ to say ‘Stop pressing Reply All’ brought the email system to its knees for about five days.”
Time Is Money, And 18 Million Emails Take A Lot Of Time To Read
“Just last week, an email was mistakenly sent to over 100,000 people in at least a dozen different countries. After about 45 minutes, there were a couple of reply-all responses. A decent amount of people replied-all saying not to reply all but didn’t realize that the email server was backed up trying to send a few million emails.
Some emails took over 10 hours from the time sent for me to receive them. This caused more people to say not to reply-all, as they hadn’t seen anyone else’s response saying so yet. Over the next 12 hours, every one of the other 100,000 people received over 180 emails, all having to do with wondering what the original email was, or telling us not to reply-all. Over 18 million emails in total.
A back-of-the-napkin estimation said it cost the companies tens of thousands of dollars. For the record, here’s my math: If all 100,000 people lost five minutes of working time to this mess, that is 500,000 minutes, which is 8333.33 (repeating, of course) work-hours. I’ll assume an average payment of $20 per hour per employee, which is likely a very low estimate. That’s over $166,000 lost.
Keep in mind that while not everyone spent five minutes reading through and deleting the emails, there were also people like me who lost upwards of five to six hours due to waiting on emails that were needed to get started on a new set of work.”
Poor Peter, The Programmer
“At the head office of a large UK insurer, Adrian, the pugnacious, unpopular, and unappealing contractor was showing Peter, a new programmer on his first day, how to use the ‘cc’ button in his e-mail application. Peter logged in, and Adrian was next to him, typing. He decided on the following message:
Subject: Weenie
Body: You are one.
He showed Peter how to call up the address book and selected the first entry which happened to be ‘A-J Surnames.’ A couple of clicks, and there it was in the ‘cc’ box.
He then stated, explicitly, ‘better not click send!’ At which point, somewhat inexplicably, he did that very thing.
About 800 employees, including the CEO, almost simultaneously looked up and start to loudly discuss exactly who this ‘Peter’ was and why he thought they might have onanistic tendencies.
Peter, rather unfairly, spent some uncomfortable time with both HR and the CEO, who was a ‘hands-on’ type, to be sure. Ironically, Adrian, who indeed was a weenie of the most furious variety, didn’t receive said email as his initial was further down in the alphabet.”
How Many Employees Does It Take To Screw Up An Email?
“Working in the claims department for a huge insurance company, one time a claim handler sent out very personal customer information to the ENTIRE company – every single employee including the CEO, security staff, building staff, even cleaning staff.
So, that’s bad enough.
But then we have this other guy decide to reply-all to that email, asking the other guy why he sent him this message – blissfully unaware that the first guy sent it to everyone in the company.
So now the first guy responds, still unaware of what happened, telling the second guy he has no idea how that email went to him.
So this email thread goes back and forth, reply-all, these two geniuses investigating what happened, for like 10 replies.
They finally decided it was a computer glitch.
I don’t know how they still have jobs.
I’d have fired them just for not knowing how reply-all worked.”
You Don’t Forget An Email Like That
“My cousin once sent an incredibly raunchy email (like, it was supposed to be funny how gross it was) meant for his girlfriend to everyone in his address book. He wrote in great detail about they were going to get it on when he got home.
This probably happened 15 years ago, and I’m sure he has convinced himself that everyone has forgotten. Things like that stay forever.”
The ‘Accidental’ Suck-Up
“There’s this woman here at work. Almost every time the CEO sends an email to all the staff announcing something new or good, she replies to all, telling the CEO how good he is and how much she admires his work and dedication to make our company better.
A few minutes later she replies to all again, apologizing for that ‘mistake’ because that was intended just for him.”
On The Plus Side, She Could Have A Great Career As A Professional Wrestler
“After an all-staff announcement (around 2000 people) from the new CEO about an upcoming downsizing, one person replied to everyone shortly after saying:
‘Can you believe this crap, Kate? This new CEO is such a freakin’ turd; I swear if I see him on the street I’ll break his neck.’
As you can imagine, that’s a threat of violence and was taken pretty seriously. On the plus side though, she didn’t have to stress about the downsizing anymore because she was swiftly fired.”
She Needed That Money For Her Next Manicure
“I’m a teacher, and I am in a group chat with my fellow department members.
This past school year, Person A lost his grandmother, whom he was very close with, a week before his wedding. He wanted her to be there, and he was quite upset. Naturally, as a department, we threw around the idea of getting him a card and putting some money in it for him.
The next day Person B, an ignorant woman who is terrible with technology, makes the mistake of replying to the group chat, instead of the person she was complaining to. Her reply went something along the lines of: ‘This is ridiculous. I don’t have the money to give him. I have too much going on in my life right now, and I don’t need this. I’m not giving money.’ Meanwhile, this lady drives a brand-spanking’ new Mercedes to school every day and spends hundreds of dollars on her hair and nails a week (she brags about it often).
Person A was extremely embarrassed, and the rest of us were not happy.”
Somebody Had To Say It!
“I worked on a TV show that everyone except the creator hated, and everyone knew from the ratings it would be canceled any second.
I was working in the legal department and was part of an email chain that included a report of outstanding legal issues for the upcoming episode. It was sent to everyone you could think of (50+ people), ranging from me (one title above entry-level) to the head of the network.
A middling executive replied to all, ‘They’re getting canceled, and we still have to deal with this crap?’
To make matters worse, she attempted to RECALL the email, just drawing more attention to it, and then replied to all again ‘PLEASE DISREGARD LAST EMAIL, TRYING TO GENERATE AN INTERNAL REPORT FOR [MY DEPARTMENT], HIT THE WRONG BUTTON.’
It was the ‘Hit the wrong button’ that sent my boss and me into hysterics. I so badly wanted to reply that we didn’t know there was a trash-talk button.”
Way To Be A Team Player, Mike
“At my university, the administration always sends out alerts to all students, faculty, and staff when an assault occurs on campus. These come in the form of both email and text messages, and everyone receives both. The idea is that people can stay safe and potentially help the police locate the suspect, and we’ve had a lot of assaults happen, so it’s pretty important.
So in the spring of my freshman year, we received an alert that an assault had occurred on campus the night before. Well this guy, Mike, who works in the university’s IT department hit reply all to that alert email, and wrote to all of the students, faculty, and staff of the school:
How do I unsubscribe to these alerts and text messages? I would still like to receive important messages… just not these.
I think he still has his job honestly, but he was quite unpopular on campus for about two or three weeks.”
Emails Don’t Grow On Trees, People!
“I worked for a delivery company, and someone sent an email about something very unimportant and CCed pretty much everyone in the company, 99 percent of whom had nothing to do with the subject. At least once a day for the next two weeks, someone would hit ‘Reply All’ and everyone would get another unimportant email.
Finally, someone freaked out and sent this email to everyone about how hitting reply all was costing the company money because the server had to send the email to so many people. Everyone at that company was pretty technology illiterate, and I found it highly amusing.”
How An Email Chain Almost Became An International Crisis
“I was planning an international friendship event with a university, two diplomatic offices, and military officers from two different countries.
One of the diplomatic offices accidentally replied all and included me in a thread where they were bemoaning how their admiral was a jerk.
The good news it was was Country A calling Country A’s admiral a jerk.
It would have been a hundred times worse if it had been Country A calling Country B’s admiral a jerk.
I just replied all and said, ‘Hi everyone, looks like perhaps I was included on this thread by accident. I’m going to start a fresh thread for the question I need to ask you guys about parking permits. Cheers!’
It was OK.”
The Proof Is In The Prints
“A design artist at a print shop I worked at 10 years ago (I’ll call her Z) had always been one of those flakey-but-only-just-good-enough to keep types. She’d create files that looked fine to customers and on a computer screen but required tons of prepress editing to make them printable. She had zero real technical skill when it should have been half her job.
One day a little after lunch, a company-wide email from Z to her husband came through, where she described waiting with glee for the opportunity to purposely screw up a big repeat yearly job right before she planned to quit eight months later. (A lot of print jobs are on an annual cycle with local businesses — this happened in February and referred to a $40,000 job that came around every October).
As IT relief, I got called in to check what happened. Sure enough, Z’s other emails sent on her workstation’s email address to her husband described other stupid things she was planning, and referred to one of her husband’s friends who worked for a rival print shop, so it was clear it was a bit of sabotage and probably upcoming poaching.
Z was fired less than an hour after the email was sent.
I didn’t mention to my bosses that the email to all the staff was sent when I knew Z was out of the office, and had originally been sent before she went to lunch, and originally only to her husband. Our other designer, a quiet mouse-type who could do the work, had seen the earlier sent emails at other times she needed to use Z’s workstation. She had copy-pasted this revealing email into a new email and then sent it to the whole company from Z’s workstation.
I just told her later in passing that I got her email about Z and gave her a thumbs up.”
Everybody Got Their Turn To Be Insulted
“We occasionally hire out of temp services during the busy seasons just to make sure we’re adequately covered for everything. We’re a decent sized customer service company with over 250 regular employees.
This one temp we hired fired for showing up excessively late two days in a row after he had only been with us for about two weeks, so he sent an angry email stuffed to the gills with colorful language to what he thought was the address reserved for everyone in that specific office’s management.
The fatal mistake was accidentally using the address that sent it to the entire company, management included, and also the executives themselves way up the ladder in corporate. It’s an address that’s pretty much reserved for management use, and only for things like policy changes, healthcare enrollment, and so on. EVERYBODY saw this train wreck crash right into this dude’s life, and from some of the crap he said, I’d be amazed if he ever found an office job again. Some of the stuff included:
-Management is a bunch of nitwits with a stick up their butt
-[Company name] only hires illiterate fools off the street
-Miscellaneous insults about specific staff members
-Threats to report the company to the Better Business Bureau and get us shut down [note that the Better Business Bureau isn’t a legal organization, it’s a review source]
-Claiming he was the best employee we ever had, and that we ‘screwed up big time’ by firing him
-Miscellaneous things about the ‘dumb supervisors who just tell lies all day.’
-Shoutout to Whacky Becky (not sure what that’s about or who she even is).
The email was eventually removed, but not before one of the hiring managers replied and informed him of why he was fired, that he was a temp worker hired through a service and not a full employee in the first place, and that she would be writing an official report and sending a copy of the email to the temp service that referred him. It was all done in this snide, talk-down-to-you tone that this particular person has a well-earned reputation for.
Not technically a ‘reply all,’ but it was terrific.”
She REALLY Wanted That Kiss
“I worked as a game developer at Maxis (a division of EA Games) in the late 90s. We had a few temporary-employee game testers, including this one girl around 20 or so.
I guess some friend of hers emailed her at work, with one of those stupid teenager spams that went something like: ‘Forward this email to five friends, and your crush will ask you out. Forward it to 10 friends, and your crush will kiss you.’ So somehow she forwarded it to ‘EA ALL’ – every employee at EA, maybe 2,500 people at the time.
I think our email system allowed a ‘recall’ function, to pull it out of the inboxes of anybody who hadn’t read it yet, and I think she tried that, but it was too late. It outraged enough people around the company (including Redwood City (HQ), Canada, Florida, and Texas), that I saw her in her boss’s office within the hour, in tears. We never saw her again.”
How Do You Embarrass The Entire Oil Industry? Here’s How
“Not my office division, but our oil field/construction division sends in bids to secure future jobs. The lowest bidder — the one who can provide the service at the lowest cost — wins. Winning a bid is sometimes scary because you wonder if you left out any estimation tables.
Anyway, our estimator sends in the bid to the proper email, which goes to a secretary. Other competitors use the same email address to send in their bids also.
Imagine our horror when the secretary sends a ‘Reply All’ with a ‘Thank you for submitting your bid for Project X,’ and all the other bids are attached to this email. So every competitor sees where each other are increasing estimations and decreasing their costs. It was both embarrassing and potentially a game-changer for every company involved, and it’s no exaggeration to say that millions of dollars were lost and gained as a result of that email.
All because a secretary pressed the wrong button.”
This One Must Have Stung
“I work at a public institution. We send out term schedules to departments so chairs, deans, and administrative assistants can review and make necessary changes.
We had a chair reply back once the following:
‘I’ve made some changes to the schedule, can you rerun the report and send it to me for my dumb-as-a-post former secretary?’
This is with the dean, chairs of the other departments in that academic college, and administrative assistants of that academic college all copied in, including the ‘dumb-as-a-post’ secretary herself. Apparently, she was on her way to being terminated for some reason. She was gone soon afterward.
We never heard back from anybody else in that department either, so I am not sure what happened. The chair that sent the email remained at the university until he ended up dying from something unexpectedly a few years ago.”
Step Into My Office, Liam Neeson
“We had a rule at my old company: don’t you dare ever ‘reply all’ to a company-wide email. It was a simple rule that got broken a lot, and as such there was zero tolerance for people replying all; people had been fired for it. Anyway, one day an employee had his cheese stolen from the fridge, and he decided to send an email to everyone by replying all to a mass email.
Employee: ‘To the person who stole my cheese, I will find you, and you will regret what you’ve done.’
I saw an opportunity, so I took it. I replied all to his email with Liam Neeson’s speech from ‘Taken,’ and replaced the word ‘daughter’ with ‘cheese.’ The CEO came by shortly after laughing at my joke. He explained that the employee had just completed a meeting with HR about the email and that I was about to have a meeting as well about my reply. He said it was hilarious, but that doesn’t excuse the rule we have in place.
Worth it! That email eventually became an inside joke with him and helped me make friends with our CEO. I called him ‘big cheese’ after that.”
When We Said It Was ‘Voluntary,’ We Meant ‘Mandatory’
“Nothing too awful, but our company used to solicit donations to a charity. They made it clear it was voluntary, and I didn’t contribute.
A few weeks later, the Accounting Manager sent an email to everyone in the company, saying,
‘If the following three people would still like to donate, please do so by this date.
Name
My Name
Name’
Really?”