As an email admin I’m sure you have experienced or have heard of email storms.

Several years ago I worked for a company that had two or three instances of email storms ruin everybody’s work day. The email storms we experienced started off very slowly. At first everything is running smoothly and people are productive but then things start to slow down. You type up an email message, hit your send button and begin to move on to the next item on your ToDo list. But then you notice that your cursor hasn’t changed from the hourglass icon to the normal arrow cursor that you’re used to seeing. Or maybe your cursor icon is still spinning as if waiting for something. This is how we experienced email storms at companies I worked at in the old days.

Last January, an e-mail storm almost shut down one of the State Department’s main electronic communications systems. What happened is that an email was errroneously sent out to several thousand recipients who compounded the mistake by hitting the “reply-all” button. This multiplied the number of emails being sent exponentially. Imagine sending one email to ten people and each of those ten people hit the “reply-all” button and resend the same email to all recipients. In effect, they had unintentionally created a denial of service attack.

In the early days of email, we experienced email storms when one person sent out a company wide email to ten’s of thousands of employees. But some of the employees were on vacation and had turned on their “I’m away from my email” message and set it to “auto-reply” mode also known as autoresponder. So then you had an auto-reply message sent out to the same large  list of recipients again and then more than a couple of those recipients were ALSO set to auto-reply and to auto-reply to ALL. Now you had a ping pong game where the ball never fell off the table because it was always returned to the same spot by somebody’s auto-reply email setting! Imagine a bouncing ball that never loses speed. Then imagine ten, twenty or even a hundred of these never ending bouncing balls and you’ve got an email storm.

Thankfully most email systems allow you to set a limit value or set up a “bit bucket” to receive email responses to broadcast or company-wide emails. If you haven’t taken these precautions as an email admin for your company and you haven’t experienced an email storm yet then consider yourself fortunate.