How to Filter Out Unwanted “Reply to All” Emails
If you’ve ever worked in a corporate environment, you’ve probably faced an Answer All misfire nightmare. This is when someone accidentally (or deliberately) blasts an email like more people than they should have, and more people call back via “answer all” asking them to be removed from the conversation and / or the mailing list.
This is usually pretty funny if you don’t work in the IT department and it disrupts your mail server, but the “Reply to All” stream can be annoying if you’re trying to get work done and are constantly distracted by notifications. If you find yourself caught in a “Reply All” spam, here’s how you can save yourself with Gmail , Apple Mail and Outlook .
Gmail / G Suite
I have two ways to solve this problem in Gmail. First, if you get a lot of unwanted overlays on a message (or all the responses it spawned) and they are all contained in the same thread, just turn off that thread. Click the letter (or click the letter), find the three-dot icon at the top of the Gmail web interface, and select Disable:
If you’re using the Gmail mobile app, the mute option should be hidden behind the three-dot icon that appears whenever you click or navigate to an email.
This may not be enough to stop the tide, especially if automatically generated out-of-office messages have begun to arrive. In this case, I recommend setting up a Gmail filter or several of them. In the browser version of Gmail, click the gear icon and select Settings, then click Filters and Blocked URLs at the top of the screen and click the blue Create New Filter button that appears in the body text – at the bottom if you already have a bunch of filters.
As for what you should include in your filter, it depends on which circle of Reply All hell you are in. You can probably add some of the words found in the subject line of the original email. (which for sure everyone is answering) that should catch most of the trash. Adding a filter for the “answering machine” can also help. It looks like this if you combine them all into one line:
Click Search to test your filter, or Create Filter to continue creating it. You can then choose not to end up with messages in your inbox or, if you’re really annoyed, go straight to the trash.
Apple Mail
The second verse is the same as the first: if you’re caught in an endless series of email replies, the quickest and easiest thing you can do to keep Apple Mail from driving you crazy is to turn off the sound. offensive conversation. Select the thread (or thread) that is driving you crazy, and then click the bell icon in the Mail toolbar:
This should drown out the stream (s). Your inbox will still fill up, but you won’t receive notifications every time a new message is added to the stack. If that’s not enough, you can also filter all of these messages from your Inbox to the Trash. Click Mail> Preferences and select the Rules icon. Click “Add Rule” and you can set various criteria for filtering the emails you receive right into the trash:
Microsoft Outlook
While Microsoft provides your IT administrators with additional automated firepower to stop Respond to All Storms before they escalate into madness, we’ll teach you how to silence them just in case.
Microsoft doesn’t let you “mute” emails in Outlook, but you can “ignore” them. Simply right-click on the email conversations and select Ignore from the context menu. When you do, this email goes to the trash can. Anything else sent as part of the conversation is automatically deleted as well.
To resume the conversation (why would you want this?), Simply pull out the trash, right-click again and select Ignore again. This will move it back to your inbox, as well as any other messages in the specified conversation that come later.
If you need to filter messages – for example, those annoying auto-replies that the Reply All storm usually generates – just click the Rules icon in the toolbar:
Create a rule and set options – for example, target specific words in a subject to intercept all Reply All emails, and then move emails that match those criteria to trash.