It seems I have a knack for choosing, on my own, the opposite of the mainstream. I feel that my friends and I have benefitted from circulating emails using a starting comment and addressed openly to all members of the group. With that arrangement, each person who wants to respond to the whole group selects "Reply all" and everybody gets a copy of her comment. It's private in that it is limited to the group involved. I realize that any member can choose to include new addressees or exclude previous recipients.
I am retired and I get more email that I delete unopened than I want but I don't have a very bad problem with 100's of emails to get through. I imagine the practice of more or less automatically responding to any message by sending to everyone involved can result in genuine headaches. I suppose that is why nearly every publication I found about "reply all" seemed to be against its use. "How to ruin your career" by using reply all seemed to be a rather common theme of books found searching for "reply all".
I am a fan of "From Gutenberg to Google" by Tom Wheeler and other books about speech, writing, printing, phones, email, texting and other tools and practices that have changed how we live and the pleasure and comfort we get from communicating with each other. I thought I had seen a book about Reply all. I wasn't sure if it was fiction or not, comedy or not. I couldn't find anything that seemed good.
I can understand replying to many and forgetting about that one person who will get my reply and be unhappy with it. I can understand that if we all comment, and comment on the comments, and we all use Reply to all, we will all have many, many emails. Still, I bet that some good communication, some good understandings and some good friendships come from replying to all.
