Microsoft Has Finally Fixed An Irritating Email Problem Dating Back To 1997

Microsoft has found a solution to a long standing problem associated with mail chains (or chain mails).

Emailers often tend to hit the Reply All function while replying to an email rather than just the Reply option. This in turn spams the inboxes of all the recipients that were not meant to be a part of the response.

Reuters

Microsoft has highlighted the solution in a new blog post, as per which, the new functionality is called Reply All Storm Protection feature. Microsoft will be rolling out the feature in its Office 365 worldwide starting Monday.

At present, the feature is meant to address the issue in large organisations. Hence, the Reply All Storm Protection feature will block replies ¡°if there are 10 ¡°reply all¡± messages sent to over 5,000 people within an hour,¡± as per the current preset conditions.

In such a case, the new Reply All Storm Protection feature will ¡°subsequent replies to the thread for 4 hours,¡± as per the blog post. As can be seen in the image below, an error message w2ill be displayed, saying ¡°Your reply to the email conversation wasn¡¯t sent¡± and that the ¡°conversation is too busy with too many people.¡±

(Image: Microsoft)

Going forward, Microsoft will gather ¡°usage telemetry and customer feedback¡± for the feature to tweak it enough to make it suitable for more users. Possible future enhancements for the Reply All Storm Protection feature include an improvement on accuracy, admin customizable thresholds and block duration, as well as reply all storm reports and notifications.

Microsoft says that the feature has already been tested for successful results within the company infrastructure. It was first announced by Microsoft at Ignite 2019 but that is not the first recorded use of the feature. Instead, its first use dates back to 1997.

BedlamDL3, a huge Reply All storm back in the year, prompted the company to come up with a Reply All Storm Protection feature. The email storm through the distribution list (DL) included one-quarter of all Microsoft employees, i.e. around 13,000 members at that time. ¡°Within an hour 15 million messages were generated, 195 GB of data, and it brought Microsoft's Exchange servers to a slow crawl. It took two days to clean it all up,¡± Microsoft reported.

Learning from a mistake of the bygone century, Microsoft has managed to come up with a unique solution to a pestering problem to many organisations. Looking back at the source issue though, one can only wonder what took Microsoft so much time for it.