I have a problem: I habitually click “reply to all” when responding to emails. I can’t help myself. I do it EVERY time I reply to an email. I don’t know why. But I can’t stop.
As you can imagine, this has caused me no end of embarrassment. Countless times I’ve responded to an email, intending to communicate only with the sender, and shamed myself by writing to everyone on the To: list.
The last time I did this was particularly embarrassing. So I went googling for a “behavior-modification” tool. I found one. It’s a plug-in for M$ Outlook called Reply To All Monitor. Full disclosure: I have no formal or informal relationship with Sperry Software, the producer of Reply To All Monitor.
The plug-in pretty much does exactly what the title suggests. It monitors you as you reply to emails. When it detects that you’ve pressed the “Reply to all” button, it simply pops a confirmation dialog. If you in fact intended to reply to all recipients, you click Yes. If not, you click No, and the plug-in strips out all respondents but the original sender.
Simple. But for me, incredibly useful. It’s by far the best 10 dollars I’ve ever dropped on a software product.
Whoever runs Sperry Software is pretty savvy about email-related behavioral disorders. Check out their product page. They’ve got a plug-in to remind you to include attachments (and who hasn’t forgotten the attachment once in their life?), strip attachments from incoming emails, and more. Nice.
