TechCrunch has an article that talks about a new policy at Nielsen corporate: The Reply-to-all function on their email is disabled.

It’s about damn time somebody thought of this.

I work in a mid-sized corporate environment, and I find myself wishing that there was a mute option on the email. Days, weeks, sometimes even months pass after my participation in an email thread is no longer relevant, and I still am receiving messages on the thread. They make so much noise that it is difficult to identify and absorb the information that is actually relevant, especially since I have been (as a system administrator) issued a pager that is tied to my email. Trying to get yourself taken out of the loop is near impossible, because it requires you to reach out to every individual on the email and plead your case, hoping that they will agree, and further hoping that they remember not to include you from there out.

It is possible that actually killing the reply-to-all button is a tad over the top, though, because there are legitimate uses. As such, I’ll post here what I posted there, and this is my proposal to tame the reply-to-all button:

1. Upon hitting the button, you get taken to a compose window as normal.
2. Upon hitting send, you are presented with a dialogue box. It lists all of the recipients with a checkmark next to each one. You are encouraged to remove checkmarks at this point.
3. For each recipient, inclusive, you are asked, with a minimum one-second hang time between questions, “Does $user really need this memo?”. This incurs a cost to sending out messages using reply-to-all. There will be no “Yes to all” button.

Actually, come to think of it, it would make the logic of the email program flow more smoothly if this interrogation were keyed on any email with more than one recipient, rather than to whether or not it is a reply to something. This would also tend to curb broadcasting.