[Businessmtg] Question on Reply/Reply All/Starting a New email

[Steve Rankin]

Hi ASPers,

 

I'd like to address the "multiple recipient" issue AKA "Reply to All".

 

 

First, a bit of history on WHY the ASP we set up the server to reject shares
sent to the ASP recovery meeting that were addressed to multiple recipients.

 

1.  SPAM control. Believe it or not, back in the dark ages of the Internet
there was SPAM, but it wasn't nearly as sophisticated as today. In fact, it
was basically little more than people manually sending emails out to long
lists of people - multiple recipients. So, setting the server control to
reject those emails was an effective way to eliminate SPAM. 

2.  When a member of ASP wants to post a share to ASP, especially if their
share is in response to a share, they have 3 possible ways to do that:

a.  Start a new share from scratch. Almost fool proof - it only goes to
whoever you manually address it to.

b.  Press <Reply> and your share will go to the individual member that you
are responding to. 

c.  Press <Reply to All> and your share WOULD go to both the ASP recovery
meeting AND the person you replied to. 

 

That creates three problems. 

 

First is the issue of cross talk. Your share would include the share you are
responding to - clearly cross talk.

 

Second is the extra traffic through the server since the share included
additional text of the original share. That might not sound like a problem,
but it can be a huge problem. We've had server capacity problems in the past
that resulted in shares being delayed by hours. As long as 8 hours. 

 

Third is the potential for posting a private message to the entire ASP
membership. Trust, me this can be incredibly embarrassing. Don't ask me why.


 

 

The solution was to set the server settings to REJECT any message sent with
"multiple recipients". Easy and it makes a lot of sense in the ASP recovery
meeting.

 

But not so much in the ASP Business Meeting.  Why not?  Let's look at the 3
reasons for this setting that I just described, plus a 4th.

 

1.  Cross talk. There is no prohibition of cross talk in the Business
Meeting. In fact, it is perfectly OK for Susie to respond to something
Margie said. This is especially useful in our online discussion.

 

In a f2f business meeting, one person talks at a time on the subject. There
is a natural flow to the discussion because everyone is in the same room at
the same time. Even, then it happens that the discussion may veer back to an
earlier time in the discussion and Peggy may want to say something about
what Larry just said now and what Susie said earlier. No problem.

 

But in our online meeting, we have people scattered all over the world that
partake in the discussion on their own time. We see this all the time as
someone responds to something that was said several hours or even days
earlier. Trying to follow the thread becomes nearly impossible because
related pieces of the thread are comingled with other pieces that may not be
related, and so on. 

 

So, it is quite helpful when member do include something from another
member's post so we can understand what they are referring to. 

 

2.  Extra Internet traffic. The amount of traffic created by the Business
Meeting is not an issue. If we have 30 members in the Business Meeting and
20 messages get posted on a busy day, that's only 600 total messages handled
by the server. By comparison, the server can process that many messages with
just one or two shares on the ASP recovery meeting. Besides, since ASP
transitioned and contracts for our own server, we just haven't had any
issues with capacity. A non-problem.

 

3.  The potential for a private share going to the entire ASP membership.
Not a real problem. For starters, the issues being discussed in the Business
Meeting are not personal sharings of ESH, so there's little if any
opportunity for a BM member to post something personal. Second, the Business
Meeting mailing list is not the entire membership of ASP anyway.

 

4.  Discussions in the Business Meeting do have time constraints. When a
member of the Business Meeting sends a message with multiple recipients, the
server holds the message until it is approved by the Secretary or List
Administrator. That may not happen for hours or even a day or so. As a
result, a pertinent post from a member is unnecessarily delayed by a
technical issue that really has little if any use in the Business Meeting.

 

In conclusion, I'd like to suggest to the Business Meeting that the server
setting be changed to allow multiple recipients. 

 

Hugs,

Steve