Microsoft Adds Protection Against Reply-All Email Storms For Exchange Users

Some of you might recall that last week, Microsoft rolled out a feature for iOS users that helped them ignore email conversations. This meant that if an email thread gets too chatty and everyone is hitting that “reply all” button in group emails, they have the option to just ignore it to stop getting unnecessary notifications.

Now it looks like Microsoft is rolling out a similar, but perhaps more enhanced version of that to its Office 365 Exchange users. Dubbed the “Reply All Storm Protection”, basically this will see Microsoft introduce a new protection feature that can automatically detect what the company calls “reply all storms”, where users, especially on large distribution lists or in large companies, might be using the reply all feature at the same time.

According to Microsoft, “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.” They add, “When the feature detects a likely reply all storm taking place on a large DL it will block subsequent attempts to reply all to the thread and will return an NDR to the sender. The reply all block will remain in place for several hours.”

Right now, Microsoft has set the threshold to 10 reply-alls to over 5,000 recipients within 60 minutes, but the company says that over time as they gather more feedback from users, this could be further tweaked and optimized.

Tyler Lee
Categories: General
Tags: Microsoft, office