As the winter break approached last year, the frequency of spam emails increased. Spam email itself isn’t much of a hassle, people telling you to subscribe to their YouTube or do something else. The real issue is the reply all feature.
Whenever these spam emails are sent out, masses of annoyed students ask the student who replied to all to stop. Even if these students have good intentions, they actually cause more harm than they help. This is due to the fact that when somebody replies all to an email, EVERYONE who was emailed gets that. This causes even more annoyance and creates a ripple effect and causes more and more people to ask other people to stop. The worst thing about this agony is that it is nearly impossible to stop.
Then there is another kind of reply all user. These people usually intentionally attempt to annoy people by saying random or irritating things to everybody which just causes the same domino effect as above. This usually makes the problem even worse.
The only way for this to stop is to teach people the difference between the replies. This could be combined with better instruction on how to use email and set up some of its cool features. This could be taught in fourth grade or can be added to an advisory session. Just to remind fellow students, reply sends a response to only the sender of the email that you are responding to and reply all sends a response to everybody.
