An email storm occurs when people hit “reply all” on group emails, causing server overload and mailbox flooding. It can be caused by accidental or contentious messages and can lead to a denial of service attack. The US State Department warned against excessive use of “reply all.”
An email storm is a situation where people start hitting “reply all” on email messages sent to a group, causing the number of messages handled by a server to dramatically increase and leaving individuals with mailboxes. post loaded with messages. While an email storm can be a topic of humor or irritation, it can also be a problem, as servers can become so overloaded that the deluge of email actually creates a denial of service attack, shutting down the server. Because of this, steps are typically taken to avoid email storms.
Most commonly, an email storm is associated with a listserv, a group of people subscribed to an email service. People can message everyone on the service with important information or correspondence, and people in the list can read these messages, reply to the sender, or choose to reply to all, by sending a message to everyone in the list. People can accidentally hit “reply all” and trigger an email storm as enraged subscribers reply to inform them that they didn’t need to send the message to everyone, setting off an email storm.
This can also occur when a contentious issue arises and all service members want to intervene. Instead of texting individual people and conducting a private conversation, people start replying to everyone, creating an email storm. Even people not interested in the discussion can message everyone, pleading with people to stop emailing the entire service. When a service has hundreds or thousands of subscribers, the server can quickly back up.
During an email storm, handling other messages on the server can slow down to a crawl. Individuals affected by the storm may have trouble accessing their mailboxes, and messages could take a long time to load. Messages unrelated to the storm can be hidden under a pile of new messages from the email storm, making it difficult for people to find the match they need to see and respond to.
In 2009, an email storm at the US State Department actually prompted threats of disciplinary action, with officials warning that the storm compromised servers and potentially exposed the names of officials working confidentially. Workers were warned to use the “reply all” option with caution, only addressing messages to an entire group of people on an email distribution list when it was actually necessary.
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