Cut the Blue Wire - *After* You Cut the Red Wire

In the early days of the Internet, when you would post an item to a Usenet newsgroup, most newsreader software would ask you if you really wanted to post, and give you this bogus, but well meaning, estimate of how much it would actually cost. Some of the email clients would also nag at you if your .sig was longer than 4 lines - back in the days when 300 baud acoustically coupled modems were the way most connected to the Internet, brevity was the soul of wit.

I seem to remember the Pine email software didn't even have a Reply All button - when you hit reply, it would ask you: Just to the sender, or to everyone on the original to: list? Many people hated that - they wanted a separate reply all button. I loved it - it always made me think before I sprayed a response out to the entire list.

In explosive ordinance disposal the old joke is about the bomb defusing instruction manual that said "Cut the red wire with a pair of non-conductive snips, but only do so after you have cut the blue wire." Boom. The equivalent in the email world is saying "Oh, crap" after you hit that reply all - the EOD email procedure doesn't work so well either. Boom.

This is a variation on the safety principle known as "interlock" - never allow function A to happen unless function B has happened or is still happening. I just had my side shot exhaust blower for my oil furnace die and the furnace kept coming on - even though that meant that 600 degree toxic air was blowing directly onto my wood subflooring - and as we all know from the great Ray Bradbury book, and Francois Truffaut movie, wood ignites at 451 degrees F - a dangerous situation. Interlocks are important features - bad when they are missing, even worse when they fail.

Most users hate those pop-up "Are you sure?" windows - until their butts are saved by one. A bit of semi-intelligent programming could easily come up with some scenarios where those warnings would only come up some of the time:

• There are 9 Distribution Lists with 876 recipients that will get this message if you hit Reply All - are you sure?
• If you hit Reply All, this message will go to a recipient (your boss, your spouse, your mother, your kids, etc) that you previously requested to be warned if you include them on a reply all - are you sure?
• The attachment to the message you just hit Reply All on has content that you previously requested to warned about - are you sure you want to send nude pictures of yourself to these 9 Distribution Lists?

Bonus warning, not really an interlock issue: "You used the word "attached" in the body of your email, yet there is no attachment. Did you intend to attach something but forgot and hit send first?" That feature alone would help me about 10 times a day.

The problem is that there really hasn't been any competition in the email client market, so there has been no real innovation from the user perspective. Maybe the burgeoning competition in the browser market will spur some more here?

Comments

[Stiennon]

I remember working at my first security company. I subscribed to a local discussion list. In the pre-address book days I just scrolled to find a message from somebody and replied to it. Only this time I did not realize I was replying to a post he had made to the list. I was asking him about job opportunities. And yes most of the executive management at my place of work also subscribed to that list. Ouch!

[Saar Drimer]

I was thinking exactly the same things.
The "reply-all" is even worse with aliases.
Sending emails to aliases should be restricted to the owner and the people above in the management chain. Otherwise, people reply-all to company-world@company.com or decide to email to the whole company about their daughter's cookie sale.

[Sec Nerd]

I just was including on a very interesting vendor email discussion that they surely did *not* want me to see. The Outlook autocomplete function filled my name in when the sender meant to copy his CFO. This is another dangerous little feature - helpful autocomplete that is order alphabetically, not by frequency of use.

My all time favorite story was from about 1996. Company put in brand new Silicon Graphics workstations in dev group, all had camera built in. Female employee did strip tease in front of the camera for her boyfriend but emailed basicall to DL All Employees because she replied to his email vs. just entering in his email address - and didn't notice the DL was in the cc field. Hee hee.