Email storm

Dear All – and I do mean “all” -

As you prob­ably have no­ticed, we are hav­ing an “email storm” in NIBR. This storm in­volves many “reply all” mes­sages to a note with the sub­ject of “groups”. This is tak­ing place on an email dis­tri­bu­tion list with roughly 5500 NIBR as­so­ci­ates. (You can read more about email storms on Wiki­pe­dia.) Key bits: We have dis­abled the dis­tri­bu­tion lists in ques­tion to stop the storm. These changes take a little while to per­col­ate through the mail sys­tems, so you may see con­tin­ued replies for a while.

In the mean­time: Please do not reply. Please do not send email ask­ing to be un­sub­scribed.

We are also in the pro­cess of put­ting mech­an­isms in place to lim­it this tak­ing place on the main NIBR mail­ing lists in the fu­ture.

How­ever: email storms are a phe­nomen­on of mod­ern life, at work and not at work. We can put some con­trols in place to lim­it them, but they will still oc­cur now and then. You will prob­ably see them take place on some oth­er list you are on at some point.

The best ac­tion, when this takes place, is to do noth­ing. Nearly any­thing you can do will only make the situ­ation worse. Do not reply all, and in par­tic­u­lar, do not reply all telling every­one not to reply all, or ask­ing to be un­sub­scribed.

Thank you to the 99.996% of the re­cip­i­ents of this email who did noth­ing. Well, there’s an­oth­er reply. 99.995%. 99.994%. Not look­ing good.

If you would like more in­form­a­tion on what these dis­tri­bu­tions lists are, why this happened, and what you can do, I will be put­ting a blog post up about this later today.

-r’m