Along with seventeen other people, I got an e-mail message last week from a project manager asking for my opinion about a certain course of action. She asked everyone to cast their vote. So…guess what happened? Everyone voted. But they sent their vote to all seventeen people.

I don’t know about you, but when I get seventeen e-mail messages about a particular topic, my eyes start to glaze over and I stop paying attention or even reading the messages. If something important comes up, I will probably miss it.

This is a highly educated, professional group of people. Youmight have thought that these people should have been smart enough not to hit “Reply All,” but that’s not really the problem. Maybe you thought that there was no other way to know what other people thought or how they cast their vote. That’s not true. There are ways to keep everyone in the loop without generating unnecessary e-mail messages.

The problem is that the project manager didn’t tell us toreply directly to her, not to all seventeen people. In this case, she could have saved the production of 289 more e-mail messages by collecting the votes andsending a message back to the group to announce which strategy got the most votes and other important points that might have come up. No one would have missed anything that way or been left “out of the loop.” They would have received fewer e-mail messages that way.

Remember that if you’re sending an e-mail to a large group, it is your responsibility to tell them how to respond. If you don’t specify, they are likely to “Reply All.”