While Microsoft corporate culture has evolved over the years, and the last twenty years have seen the introduction of new mass communication mechanisms like Yammer and Teams, we remain an email heavy company. Many product teams have related “Selfhost” or “Discussions” aliases (aka “Discussion Lists” or DLs) to which thousands of employees subscribe so they can ask questions and keep an eye on topics relevant to the product.

As a consequence, many employees like me get hundreds or thousands of emails every day, the majority of which I don’t read beyond the subject line. To keep things manageable, I keep a long list of email sorting rules in Outlook designed to sort inbound mails to folders based on whether it was sent directly to me, to a particular alias, etc.

One such rule, which sorts mail from the Edge browser Selfhost alias looks like this:

Generally, this approach works great. However, almost every day there are one or more messages sent by well-meaning employees that drop into my inbox, often beginning with something like:

[BCC’ing the large alias to reduce noise.]

Bill, I’ll take this issue offline and work with you directly to investigate.

Don’t be this guy.

Please, I’m begging you with all of my heart, do not do this!

Despite your best intentions (reducing noise for others), you’re instead dramatically amplifying the prominence of your message.

When you move large DLs to BCC, it has the effect of breaking recipients’ email sorting rules such that it increases the prominence of your email by dropping it in thousands of employee’s inboxes instead of the folders to which the mail would ordinarily be neatly sorted.

Taking an issue “offline” also often has the side-effect of hiding information from everyone else on the alias, and getting information is usually why they joined the alias in the first place!

Instead, please do this:

I’ll investigate this issue with Bill, directly and after we figure out what’s going on, I’ll reply back to the alias with our findings.

Email to Alias

Hey, Bill– Can you try <a,b,c> and send me the log files collected? I’ll take a look at them and figure out what’s going on so I can reply back to the Selfhost alias with the fix timeline and any workarounds.

Email sent only to Bill

Thanks for your help in saving attention!

-Eric

Impatient optimist. Dad. Author/speaker. Created Fiddler & SlickRun. PM @ Microsoft 2001-2012, and 2018-, working on Office, IE, and Edge. Now a GPM for Microsoft Defender. My words are my own, I do not speak for any other entity. View more posts