This reply-all snafu at the Department of State must have been hilarious to watch unfold:

"Department staff hitting 'reply to all' on an e-mail with a large distribution list is causing an e-mail storm on the department's OpenNet e-mail system," says the unclassified cable that was sent Thursday by Under Secretary of State for Management Patrick Kennedy.

He said the result was "effectively a denial of service as e-mail queues, especially between posts, back up while processing the extra volume of e-mails."

The cable orders employees to "take immediate action" to ensure they and their colleagues are "aware of the negative impact of hitting 'reply all'" and to delete e-mails addressed to large numbers of people that they might receive in error.

"Anyone who disregards these instructions will be subject to disciplinary actions," Kennedy wrote in the cable, which begins: "Please ensure widest distribution of this message."

Quite a culture of trust at State. Someone sends an obviously errant message to an oversize State Department email distribution list and thousands insist on letting all their collegues know they caught the error. Then, as if the experience of shutting down the computer system isn't enough to make State employees pause the next time, the department feels compelled to issue a threat of disciplinary action as a preventative measure.

Interestingly, I was able to draw some culture conclusions from another email dustup. When I was in the Air Force, the "I love you" virus made it into our email system. Emails showed up in my in-box with the subject "I love you". If one opened it, the program would replicate itself and send an "I love you" message to everyone in that person's email address list. Fortunately most of us deleted the email as soon as we saw the subject since we doubted the sender really was sending us a love note. Some people did open those messages and I'll note the only "I love you" emails I got were from the computers of my fighter pilot friends.

H/T Bilbo