Late last year, when students were studying hard for finals and getting ready to head home for the holidays, Replyallcalypse descended upon NYU. You may have heard about this one very unpopular – or popular, depending on how you look at it – NYU student who accidentally hit “reply all” to a university email. Instead of sending the email to his mother, which was his original intent, his email went to all 40,000 NYU students. Yikes!Having made that humiliating mistake before (although on a much smaller scale), my heart goes out to the poor student. From the responses that I’ve seen, reporters, bloggers and even late-night talk show hosts have come down hard on NYU, and a few companies have even called for a ban on replying all. Does “reply all” deserve such a bad rap? I don’t think so, but I would suggest taking a minute to consider the ideas below before sending an email to a group:

• Ask yourself, “Would this question or information be better suited for my company’s enterprise social network (such as Yammer, Chatter, a wiki page or a discussion board)?” If so, be the first to move the conversation there.
• Scroll down the email trail and if people have responded “no” or spoken up to say that they aren’t involved, you can remove them from the distribution list. Given the amount of email everyone receives these days, they will probably thank you for it.
• Instead of listing all the email addresses in the “to” or “cc” field, consider blind copying them (the “bcc” field). That way if anyone does decide to reply all it will go to the sender only and not the entire group.
• Be direct. If you don’t want your recipients to reply all, just tell them so in your email.

There is one instance when I think reply all is downright awesome. Let’s say you’re part of a small team (5-7 people), and a new hire on your team asks for suggestions for a great lunch spot or a local dry cleaners. What should you do? Reply all, for sure!