Microsoft Launches New Office 365 Features Blocking Reply-All Email Storms

[SaM]

Microsoft has begun rolling out a new feature in Office 365 to help IT staff stop the scourage that is “Reply-All email storms.” ZDNet reports:

The feature started rolling out this week to all Office 365 users worldwide. In its current form, Microsoft says the “Reply All Storm Protection” feature will block all email threads with more than 5,000 recipients that have generated more than 10 Reply-All sequences within the last 60 minutes. Once the feature gets triggered, Exchange Online will block all replies in the email thread for the next four hours, helping servers prioritize actual emails and shut down the Reply-All storm.

Microsoft said it would also continue working on the feature going forward, promising to add controls for Exchange admins so they can set their own storm detection limits.Other planned features also include Reply-All storm reports and real-time notifications to alert administrators of an ongoing email storm so that they can keep an eye on the email server’s status for possible slowdowns or crashes.
The article notes Microsoft has experienced two different “Reply-All email storms” internally witin the last 18 months which included more than 52,000 employees, “who ended up clogging the company’s internal communications for hours.”

A post on Microsoft’s Exchange blog now says “We’re already seeing the first version of the feature successfully reduce the impact of reply all storms within Microsoft.”