Reply-All creates is a ddos attack?

One can read in an Associated Press article that the US State Department have their email system bogged down due to too many people use the Reply-All function in their email client. IT Departments have asked people to not use Reply-All and also threaten with disciplinary action. To me, that is the wrong path forward.

Sure, it is problematic to get too much email that does not concern you, but that it would be a problem to have too many people do reply-all is strange to me. Without knowing any details it seems like if the email system store each message that is delivered to more people than one as one copy per receiver. Instead as one message and then just pointers from their message to the shared data. I.e. regardless of whether a message has one or thousand recipients, it should be stored once. Of course this might not be the problem, but the problem might be just the number of messages that the system has to process. I hope we can get some more data on what really happens.

Otherwise I have problems with people that do not use Reply-All. They send you a message, and when you reply, you add someone as cc: that should be part of the conversation. The person originally starting the discussion do Reply (only) and you have to forward the message plus add the 2nd person as Cc: again.

No, I am in favor for more use of the Reply-All feature, but on the other hand, that implies that first of all people understand when to reply to messages at all, and that email server implementations do the right thing. Am I asking for too much?

I soo much remember this old Dilbert strip from 1995 that point out the problem. Have a look at it…