There are many technology solutions that help reduce information overload, with varying degrees of success; I’ll be reviewing many of them in this blog. But the simplest of these is this: remove the Reply to All (RTA) button from the email client! Technically, this is trivial to implement, a simple customization. But it is interesting to study the reactions the idea elicits.

Reply to All is a major pain point in the enterprise; not that it doesn’t have many valid and useful uses, but there are always a sufficient number of people around who will send a Reply to All when replying to something nobody needs to know, like what entree they prefer in the coming departmental dinner. This is so visibly stupid that it gets great attention, and I find that when you ask people about email overload issues in their company RTA abuse is often a top selection. Everyone agrees that this should be fixed – until you mention removing the button. As soon as you do, people almost go pale; “oh no, you can’t so that!“

Let’s be clear about the meaning of this solution. People will still be able to reply to all; all it takes is cut-and-pasting the addresses from the old to the new message, a couple of seconds’ work. Yet during those two seconds the sender is forced to think: do I really need to copy everybody? The silly RTA messages will not make it through a second’s scrutiny, but even legitimate messages may well have their dist list pruned. This is definitely a Good Thing.

On the negative side, Knowledge Workers tend to work in teams, where the entire team may need to be copied. Admittedly, this may indicate that they should abandon email in favor of a Wiki, Forum, or other platform optimized for team interaction; and even in email they can use a distribution list alias instead of the explicit list, getting around the need to use RTA at all. And still, people resist the idea. Nielsen company, the media research folks, removed RTA across the company last January, resulting in a flurry of discussion and criticism reflected in blog posts and comments to them. Some discussions were more or less balanced, like that on TechCrunch, while others degenerated into outright ridicule, like here (you gotta love the title!). The comments mention some other companies who tried this; for my part I have personal insight into one – a large financial company in Israel where one group did it, with reported positive outcome for the email overload.

Given the controversy, I suppose the solution needs some tweaking; and many ideas come to mind. For instance, the client might be modified to disable RTA only for messages with over (say) 15 recipients; or it could be made to pop an alert – “Did you notice you’re replying to more than 15 people?”, leaving the decision up to the user. This last was one feature of the “Email Effectiveness Coach” Outlook add-on I introduced at Intel some years ago. Lastly, and simplest, is this idea: don’t eliminate the RTA button – simply move it to the far end of the toolbar, away from its usual place next to Reply. Even that might suffice to interfere with the thoughtless click…