How to Win the “Reply All” War

3 min readOct 11, 2018

Taken from real email thread today. You’ve seen it before. There’s a mistake email sent to a big email list:

From: Joe Mistaker to “BigEmailList” at “BigCo”

“Hey all”

And then the replies start. They start friendly, then people get frustrated, they get increasingly angry as the “Reply All” snowball gains momentum and covers everyone. The proper way to handle it is for everyone to see that it was a mistake email sent to a huge list and actually ignore it. But instead we got a collection of phrases and memes and educational recommendations (these are real, I didn’t make anything up below):

Phrases Used in Reply All Situations

I hit IGNORE but am still receiving all these..Thanks all for the laughs, made my morning.

Can you remove me please?

What’s this all about, anyway?

Guys plzzz no reply to all

Can you remove me from the list, Please !!

[Some guy also tweeted out a link to an amazon product with his affiliate code entered in. There’s a future entrepreneur.]

PLEASE PLEASE STOP REPLYING THIS EMAIL. Totally unnecessary.

Seriously people! This ridiculous thread is going to 10k people. Stop it already .

#WHY_I_DIDN’T_REPLY_ALL

PLEASE DO NOT REPLY TO “Big List(DL)”.

And please whoever is responsible for that group stop this !!!

Would it be possible for everyone NOT to press REPLY ALL!!!! I now have 200+ e-mails with “Please remove me”… come on guys you are creating a mail wave that will not stop… if you are to reply then don’t use reply all 😉