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Microsoft Trying to Stop Reply All Storms

May 11, 2020

One of the bad things about email is the ease to quickly reply to all recipients on a message even when you shouldn't. Even Microsoft suffers from the significant amount of email traffic internally because of the reply all function. That's about to change. According to a post by Paul Thurrot, Microsoft is rolling out a feature called Reply All Storm Protection to Exchange Online customers. The Exchange Transport Team stated, "When a Reply All mail storm happens in your organization, it can disrupt business continuity and in some cases even throttle the rest of your organization's email for a period of time. The Reply All Storm Protection feature [will] help reduce the impact that Reply All storms can have on large organizations. Today we're pleased to announce that the feature is now rolling out in Office 365 worldwide."

As Paul clarified, the feature will only be available for Exchange Online customers and not those using Outlook.com. "Here's how this new feature works: When Exchange Online detects a likely Reply All storm taking place in a large distribution list (DL), it will block subsequent Reply All attempts and will respond with a Non-Delivery Report (NDR) to the sender. Reply All Storm Protection detects a Reply All storm by looking for 10 Reply Alls to over 5000 recipients within 60 minutes. Subsequent replies to the thread are then blocked for 4 hours."

Apparently, it wasn't an option to just remove the Reply All button. Instead, Microsoft opted to protect users from themselves.

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