Email mess

[WithoutMotive]

Someone here has been a bit of a plonker.

 

They decided to send all staff an email, however they went the wrong way about it. Instead of using the "allstaff" email, for which they have access, they selected all of the staff in their address book. This would have worked perfectly well and, for someone who didn't remember about the "allstaff", a valid alternative... which would have been fine had they checked the recipients before they sent the message. Hidden among the email addresses was out IT Support address.

 

Sooo... on sending the email, our helpdesk picked it up and created a ticket with the sender as creator and CCing every single member of staff. On creation, obviously, an email was automatically sent TO EVERYONE acknowledging the creation. I accepted the job (before I realised what had happened) which sent an email TO EVERYONE telling them the job was assigned to me. Then, I closed the job sending an email TO EVERYONE telling them the job was closed.

 

Now, I have countless members of staff emailing me asking what job it was referring to... aarrgghh!!

[Boredguy]

Just reply that the job was testing if anyone was reading their e-mails

[Davit2005]

Limit the amount of recipents if possible in your email server.

 

We only allow certain staff to send All Staff emails here, people you'd hope have the common sense not to use it for personal needs i.e. I've got something to sell

[Meldrew]

We only allow certain staff to send All Staff emails here, people you'd hope have the common sense not to use it for personal needs i.e. I've got something to sell

 

We get that all the time here - everyone is able to send to all staff so regularly:

I've got a table and chairs to sell - I've attached half a dozen 5mb photos to show what they look like.

or

Hi everyone. I've lost my glasses. Then later, Hi everyone, I've found them now.

 

Grr.

 

Meldrew

[DalekSec]

We have it so the Helpdesk (Spiceworks) Doesn't send out when tickets are created/assigned. They don't get anything back from the Helpdesk software. Obviously they do from us!

[Andrew_C]

Many years ago we had similar.

 

NM was working up a "rude word" system. It would email him every time a rude email was sent. Including the email telling him about the rude email. Instant loop, and very soon, a full server.

[WithoutMotive]

We have it so the Helpdesk (Spiceworks) Doesn't send out when tickets are created/assigned. They don't get anything back from the Helpdesk software. Obviously they do from us!

I tried this for a while with Spiceworks but then got fed up with people stopping me on the corridor asking if I'd got their email!

[WithoutMotive]

We get that all the time here - everyone is able to send to all staff so regularly:

I've got a table and chairs to sell - I've attached half a dozen 5mb photos to show what they look like.

or

Hi everyone. I've lost my glasses. Then later, Hi everyone, I've found them now.

 

Grr.

 

Meldrew

I've been surprised how lucky we've been, actually. All staff emails are sent for legitimate reasons and not that often. This particular instance was also legitimate, he just forgot the email address (allstaff@ isn't that hard to remember).

[Homer]

I have incoming mail off on our helpdesk for this reason, otherwise it gets CC'd in to all kinds of crap and then you have a hundred jobs open about something that only needed one job.

 

We moderate our all staff lists as well so nobody can send messages advertising a washing machine for sale etc

[Hokalus]

We had similar occur a while ago and our all-staff distribution list is restricted as certain staff used to send EVERYTHING to it.

 

1) A member of staff e-mailed both all-staff and the helpdesk

2) The helpdesk software (Spiceworks) replied back to both the sender and all-staff.

3) Sadly for Spiceworks the helpdesk e-mail account didn't have permission to send to all-staff so it got a bounce back notification.

4) Spiceworks thought the bounce-back was a response so it added it to the ticket and notified all parties (the original sender and all-staff) that the ticket had updated.

5) Go to step 3 until the ticket length reached the maximum (around 600 e-mails I think) at which point it sulked.

 

The Helpdesk e-mail account now has permission to send to all-staff.

Edited May 25, 2016 by Hokalus

[smurfomatic]

We allow everyone to send to "All Staff" - we also have other, more appropriate distribution lists covering Nursery to Year 2, Years 3 & 4 and Years 5 to 8 as well as one for admin staff. However, staff were recently told off about using them for inappropriate messages, and the number of emails sent back and forth has dropped noticeably as teachers email only those concerned with Billy's lost pencil case and not everyone in the school.

[Hokalus]

We allow everyone to send to "All Staff" - we also have other, more appropriate distribution lists covering Nursery to Year 2, Years 3 & 4 and Years 5 to 8 as well as one for admin staff. However, staff were recently told off about using them for inappropriate messages, and the number of emails sent back and forth has dropped noticeably as teachers email only those concerned with Billy's lost pencil case and not everyone in the school.

 

We tried that, worked for a while then levels crept back up again, in the end the head told us to restrict it.

[DavePa]

We had a steady stream of the "Jimmy in year 7 has lost his jumper - it's a blue one, with the logo on it (like the rest of them) with his name written on the label (like the rest of them) and he last had it at morning break. If anybody finds it blah blah blah". With the various items for sale and requests for help this reached as many as 20-30 a day on occasion so was eventually restricted to only key people being able to mail all_staff with others being restricted. Have to say it has cut down on the unwanted email considerably without noticeably affecting anything else. Not sure Jimmy ever found his jumper though

[smurfomatic]

We're still getting lost property emails - despite staff being told to email the school office so it can be put on the information screens. Had to do a check the other day as a parent had asked why staff don't respond more quickly to emails. On an "average" day we have 1,600 (internal and external) emails through our server - for less than 100 staff accounts - and that counts an email with multiple recipients as one message.

[Garacesh]

We tried that, worked for a while then levels crept back up again, in the end the head told us to restrict it.

 

We canned our Everyone@ mailing list because it was being abused too much. Protip: If you're starting an email with "Sorry if this doesn't apply to you," it doesn't need to be sent to Everyone.

 

Everyone includes HR, Finance, IT Support and the Kitchen staff. People who don't deal with pupils at all, and thus don't need to know that Joe Bloggs has hurt his leg and must be let free from lessons 2 minutes early. They also don't care that you've got a meeting set up with Jane Doe's mum and they also are not going to be able to provide you with feedback to pass on.

 

We sent numerous emails advising against it. We put notices up in all the staff rooms with other mailing lists (such as heads-of-year, teaching staff (including support staff such as TA's), departmental lists, etc) but they rarely got used. So we just turned it off and created a new email address and limited it so very few people are authorised to send to that mailing list. People weren't happy at first, but if they'd listened in the first place, then we could have kept it.