What is REPLY ALL in Email?

Imagine this:

Your friend has sent you an email containing an amazingly funny joke.

One like I usually tell, eh?

So you decide to press the REPLY button to say “thank you” (remembering to add a laughing emoji, of course ?).

But just before you do, you notice that your friend has sent that same joke email to many more people than you.

You can tell that because there are lots of other email addresses in the TO box and in the CC box at the top of the email.

So you come up with a great idea. A cunning plan.

Instead of pressing REPLY to say thank you to just your friend, you press REPLY ALL.

What Does REPLY ALL do?

REPLY ALL will send your reply not just to your friend, but also to all those other people he’s sent the joke to.

Yep. All those people you saw in the TO and CC boxes.

So you hit REPLY ALL, write your own even better joke, and send that to everyone.

Then you wait to see who replies to you with a laughing emoji.?

Is Using REPLY ALL Ethical?

That’s a big question. 

Is it ethical to reply to everyone?

Well, I suppose it depends on who they are.

If you know all those people, it should be OK.

But if you don’t know them, those people might think they’re getting spam from a stranger and mark you as a sender of spam. 

Oh, dear! You don’t want that.

Email Etiquette

Really, what should have happened is this:

Your friend shouldn’t have made all those other people’s email addresses visible. 

He could have hidden them in the BCC box instead.

BCC hides all those other email addresses.

But, hey, that’s the subject of another blog post.

For now, though, I’ll leave the ethics to your conscience.

Suffice to say… that’s what REPLY ALL does. It replies to everyone who’s been included in the email. 

When to Use REPLY and REPLY ALL

HubSpot puts it succinctly, summing up in two sentences what I’ve said.

They write…

Thank you, HubSpot!

REPLY ALL in The Tech it Easy Workshop

We did a whole Back to Basics workshop on Email.

And in it, we covered…

• FORWARD
• REPLY
• REPLY ALL

As well as CC and BCC.

And I made this short video as a quick explainer of the differences between FORWARD, REPLY and REPLY ALL.

Enjoy a Tech it Easy Live Workshop

If you fancy joining – or even hosting – a live workshop, here are the Tech it Easy workshops.

And for this new season of Back to Basics, I’m creating a new workshop each month. 

So if you have zero or very little techie knowledge and you want to learn some techie things, this new series could be exactly what you’re looking for.

What is REPLY ALL in an email? How do you use it? Here's a simple explanation. #email Share on X