You have all been there.  Someone sends a contraversial email to a very large distribution list, and then various recipients respond with their own thoughts on the subject.  After some time, the number of responses becomes unweildy.  People begin to express their annoyance over the amount of “spam” in their inbox from this distribution list, and ask that future replies be taken “offline.” 

Within moments, others ironically express their agreement that the distribution list is not the appropriate forum for these discussions.  Still others respond in disagreement and the email thread begins to spiral out of control. 

The latest instance of this at Microsoft prompted someone to respond with the following:

During the late 1990’s, there was a famous incident inside our network where a distribution list called BEDLAM DL3 that included over 25,000 names of Microsoft aliases was used to send a message. When one employee concluded that the message wasn’t relevant, and wondered why she had been included on it, she mailed the entire list asking to be removed — a common error.  That set of a storm of Reply All’s saying “Me too”, followed by another storm of Reply All’s saying “Stop using Reply-All, it bogs down the email system”, and so on. In a matter of an hour, 15.5 million messages, representing 195 Gigabytes of bandwidth, passed across the network, bringing the entire email system to its knees. 

déjà vu – sorry to contribute to it – but thought you might be amused.

This luckily, put an abrupt end to the thread.  Feel free to use this as appropriate in your place of work.  You can find more details of Bedlam3 here.