The Joys of Email

Until today, I had only heard stories of other people's work inboxes being bombarded by mass email reply-to-all disasters. Now, I can finally say that I have experienced this monument of human stupidity for myself.

I don't know how it originally started, but around 9 am this morning I got an email from some random person in the company network saying "please remove my address from this list". Since then, I have gotten about 200 more messages of people who inexplicably keep choosing to reply-to-all with various responses. A sample of the messages I've been receiving:

"I don't know who you are?"
"What is going on here?"
"I have no idea what any of you are talking about"
"Nor do I know what this is about"
"I also don't know what this is about"
"Please take me off your list. These emails are clogging up my inbox"
"Ditto"
"Dito"
"delete my name"
"Dito"
"Ditto"
"Me too!"
"and me too!"
"Remove me also"
"Ditto for me."
"I think you sent this to me in error."
"I agree with Tom. Does anyone know what's going on?"
"I agree with Tom and Maria, this must be a mistake."
"PLEASE DO NOT REPLY TO ALL!"
"I probably should not be responding for fear of further email assault, but this is a virus of some sort"
"WHY ARE YOU SENDING THIS TO ME"
"If you mental giants would stop replying to all, this problem would not be continuing"
"I have no choice but to reply all because I don't know who sent me the message"
"I am talking to Help Desk. They say to not reply to the messages and just delete them."
"Do you people realize that this is probably some sort of virus??"
"Hi Belinda, I noticed your name on the list and just wanted to say hi. How are you, other than getting erroneous emails in your inbox?"

Seriously, all of those were actually among the messages I received throughout today. I just don't understand how so many people can be so dumb and ignorant when it comes to email. The people who are stupid enough to reply-all when they want to be removed from a list are annoying enough. But even more frustrating is all the people who feel the need to teach everyone else about how they shouldn't reply-all, when in so doing they only add more to the congestion and don't help any of us at all. Then there's the retards who actually look at the other names on the thread and try to talk to an individual by replying to everyone. There's probably tens of thousands of people across the country on this company-wide network, and because you feel like saying what's up to one other person, you muck up all these other people's mailboxes?

The sad thing is, there actually was an official company email sent out at 11 that specifically told people NOT to reply to these messages and to just to delete them. 4 hours later, I'm still getting more replies. Utterly ridiculous, I say.