Loughborough University’s IT Services are implementing a change to their Email system which will mean students and staff can no longer accidentally ‘Reply All’ to an email.
The long-overdue change will put an end to students replying to entire classes, modules or programmes.
From January 2021, IT Services will be carrying out work on the University Email system for both Staff and Student email when using an internet browser, meaning when accessing their mailbox through Outlook on the web, they will experience a new default setting when responding to an email.
The new setting will display ‘Reply’ instead of ‘Reply All’, although students and staff will still have the option to ‘Reply All’, which will still be available by using the drop-down ‘more actions’ menu.
From mid January 2021 the default setting will start to be applied, with IT Services beginning with staff mailboxes before moving on to students.
The University have said that the change will bring improved security, reducing the likelihood of unintended emails and the risks of data breaches that come with an accidental ‘Reply All’.
But most importantly, the change will prevent the dreaded ‘Reply All moment’ for students and staff across campus, as well as ’email storms’ caused by a misdirected message.
Mistake-prone students and staff can also enable the ‘Undo Send’ option in webmail, which will allow an email to be cancelled even after it has been sent – for up to 10 seconds.
This can be found in the ‘Compose and Reply’ settings inside Outlook for Web.
Other email providers such as Gmail (who the University used to use until 2017) have also already rolled out such a change by default, and have also enabled a 30-second ‘Undo Send’ option.
