Microsoft Office 365 users get ‘Reply-All Storm’ controlling feature: Here’s what it does

There have often been times when a company sends an email to all the employees and some of them end up hitting the 'reply all' button, sending their reply mails to thousands of people at once. This might result in massive traffic generation on servers, which in turn can slow them down or in certain cases, crash them. Microsoft, however, seems to be aware of this and has finally rolled out a feature to help IT staff detect and stop such 'replay-all email storms.'

The feature is now rolling out to Office 365 users around the world. It aims to block all email threads that has over 5000 recipients and have more than 10 Reply-All sequences in last 60 minutes. The feature is designed to block all the replies to that email thread for the next four hours, giving servers enough time to prioritise emails and shut down the 'reply all storm'.

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However, that's not all, Microsoft adds that it will keep improving this feature over time, giving more control to Exchange admins so they can customise the storm detection limits. Some other features that are in the pipeline include reply all storm reports and real time alerts to notify admins about an ongoing storm.

"We're already seeing the first version of the feature successfully reduce the impact of reply all storms within Microsoft (humans still behave like humans no matter which company they work for ;) and believe it will also benefit many other organizations as well," added the firm in its community web page.

For those unaware, Microsoft announced this feature last year during the Ignite 2019 conference.