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- Microsoft is rolling out a new Office 365 feature that will block responses to messages on large email distribution lists.
- The feature is activated when the system receives 10 total response responses on a thread with more than 5,000 recipients in 60 minutes.
- Those who try to reply in that thread will see a message notifying them that their email was not sent because the conversation is too busy.
- Visit the Business Insider home page for more stories.
Microsoft hopes to end those mass response email threads clogging your inbox.
The company is rolling out a new feature for Office 365 targeting large, company-wide emails that will block responses to messages sent to large distribution lists, ZDNet previously reported.
The new capability, which the tech giant announced last year, will kick in when it detects 10 total response responses to more than 5,000 receivers in 60 minutes.
When this happens, Microsoft will block any responses in that thread for four hours. Those who try to reply will see a message notifying them that their email was not sent because the conversation is too busy.
The service will also suggest that users try to reply or forward the message to a smaller group of people rather than the entire chain. Microsoft also says it plans to tweak and tweak the feature in the future.
The update should fix a nuisance that has plagued the office inboxes for years. As professional coach Barbara Pachter previously told Allana Akhtar and Marguerite Ward of Business Insider, you really only need to hit the reply all button if you’re sure everyone in the email chain needs to see your message.
It is a problem that Microsoft is too familiar with. Last year, more than 11,000 employees were caught in a storm of responses. Microsoft has already been using the new feature internally, the company said.
“We are already seeing that the first version of the feature successfully reduces the impact of responding to all storms within Microsoft (humans still behave like humans no matter what company they work for;) and we believe it will also benefit many other organizations. ” the company wrote in a blog post.
In addition to the new addition to Office 365, both Microsoft and Google offer the ability to ignore or mute irrelevant conversations in their respective email tools.
