Microsoft Office 365 to get protection against Reply-All Mail Storm

Back in January 2019, as many as 11,543 Microsoft employees fell victim to the reply-all e-mail apocalypse, which is popularly known as Reply-all Mail Storm, according to a Business Insider report. Now, to make sure the users don’t fell victim to the email-apocalypse, Microsoft is working towards bringing the feature to Office 365.

For those unaware, an email storm is a sudden spike of “reply all” messages on an email distribution list. It can start when even one member of the distribution list replies to the entire list at the same time.

“When a Reply-All mail storm happens in your organization it can disrupt business continuity and even cause unexpected throttling of your organization’s mail flow within Office 365,” Microsoft stated.

“While Exchange Online has several features designed to help prevent Reply-All storms (e.g. Distribution List (DL) allowed sender lists and recipient limits) that reduce the severity and impact of reply-all storms, they can still happen, especially if the DLs haven’t been locked down tightly.”

“The new Reply-All Storm Protection planned to arrive in Exchange Online during Q3 2020 works by detecting when Reply-All storms happen or are likely to happen and automatically block the involved users from replying to each other for a limited amount of time, “Bleeping Computer reported.

“The temporary block will be active for several hours, usually enough time to dampen end-user enthusiasm to reply to the thread, and thus curtail the storm before it gets started or before it gains much momentum,” the development team adds on the planned feature‘s Microsoft 365 roadmap entry.