It all started with one well meaning email… 

Most students have probably noticed their school inboxes getting bombarded with hundreds of emails all connected to one singular thread sent to the collective student body. 

What started as an email sent to inform students of the after school club, Green team, an extracurricular focused on cleaning up the outdoors and taking care of the Earth, turned into a convoluted mess that only got worse as time progressed. 

Multiple students made the honest mistake of pressing ‘reply all’ instead of just ‘reply’ to an email from a teacher that went out to the entire student body, causing the whole school to receive yet another email, which is understandable considering the default for replying is ‘reply all’. From there, though, things escalated to students, again pressing reply all, requesting to be taken out of the thread. While these students meant well, it only meant more and more emails being sent out to every inbox. 

Some students realized what was going on and tried to inform others that the only way to stop it would be to just stop replying at all; however, as hundreds of more emails poured into inboxes, things got even more out of hand.  

Jokes and separate conversations with friends took over the thread, pushing it as far from its original message as possible. This only became more and more disjointed as the day went on, making students beg to be taken out, if only to get away from the madness. 

The solution to all of this? Learn the difference between the ‘reply’ and the ‘reply all’ button, and if you get sucked into the whirlwind that is a thread containing the entirety of the student body, just don’t reply and we can avoid this ever happening again.