Microsoft launched a new feature this week to help Office 365 customers locate their IT staff and avoid “Reply-All email storms.”
The term refers to situations in which employees use the option to reply to everyone in emails sent by mass mail, such as company-wide notifications.
If the number of recipients in the email chain is large, and if many employees press the reply-all button, the resulting event generates massive traffic that generally slows or crashes the email server.
Microsoft has also faced two such incidents, the first in January 2019 and the second in March 2020. The storm of all-response emails from Microsoft involved more than 52,000 employees, who stopped internal communications from the company for hours.
Last year at the Microsoft Ignite Conference, Microsoft announced that it would work on a feature that would help prevent full-response email storms on the Office 365 Exchange email server.
The feature debuted this week for all Office 365 users worldwide. In its current form, Microsoft says that the “reply to all storms” feature will block all email threads with more than 5,000 recipients that have generated more than 10 total response sequences in the last 60 minutes.
Once this feature is enabled, Exchange will block all responses in the online email thread for the next four hours, allowing the server to prioritize actual email and turn off the response storm.
Microsoft said it would continue to work on the feature in the future as well, promising to add controls for Exchange plug-ins to set its own storm detection limits.
Other planned features include full response storm reports and real-time notifications to alert administrators of an ongoing email storm so they can monitor the status of email servers for possible delays or failures.
And since Microsoft recently had its clashes with email storms, its own network has proven to be the best evidence base for the feature.
“Humans still behave like humans no matter which company they work for,” the Exchange team said this week. “We’re already seeing the first version of the feature successfully reduce the impact of reply all storms within Microsoft.”
Source: Threats Hub
