In the Office Suite 365, Microsoft wants to prevent users from carelessly responding to large e-mail distribution lists and thus paralyzing networks.

It happened quickly: The user clicks on “Reply all” and confirms this with “Send”. And he may already be answering a huge mailing list – and others from the mailing list may reply again. This can paralyze networks. Microsoft therefore built a function in Microsoft 365 that prevents this.

According to a report by ZDnet.com, the so-called Reply-All Storm Protection ensures that e-mails are transformed into mailing lists, with the limit being 5,000 people in the distribution list. Exchange Online users can no longer easily respond to such a distribution list.

The protective function starts when ten “answer all” are sent to more than 5,000 recipients within 60 minutes. Then Exchange Online blocks subsequent replies to the thread for four hours.

In the future, Microsoft also wants to enable administrators of Exchange servers to draw their own limits and generate notifications when such mail attempts are made.

According to the report, Microsoft itself has enabled two so-called reply-to-all breakdowns in the past 1.5 years, which affected more than 52,000 employees. This resulted in hours of interruptions in email delivery.
Microsoft Office 365 is now only called Microsoft 365

Since the end of April 2020, Office 365 has only been called Microsoft 365. For around 10 euros a month, up to six users have access to the standard office programs and 1 TB of onedrive memory per person.

Additional functions have also been announced for Microsoft 365, such as the Microsoft Editor, which suggests text formulations to users if they are missing the words or a phrase is to be rewritten. Editor should be able to incorporate suitable quotes for statements in texts and find meaningful synonyms for repetitions.