Not the air conditioner or the permanently empty water cooler we’re afraid, not even the colleague that microwaves fish in the breakroom; the problem Microsoft has solved is being caught in a never-ending thread of reply-all’s.

The feature Microsoft are rolling out this week, which they’ve called Reply All Storm Protection will hopefully protect your inbox going forward from a force 10 email storm.

It’s designed to detect when someone hits reply-all by mistake and then puts all recipients in the thread on a temporary time-out to prevent even more reply-all emails along the lines of “Can I be taken off this thread please” or “Ooops… did you mean to reply-all there?”

Currently the role out is only aimed at large organisations and will only trigger of ten reply-all emails are sent out to a distribution list of at least 5,000 people within an hour.

Once the feature spots this it will block all replies in the thread for the next four hours.

If a user tries to reply they’ll receive a non-delivery report.

We’re already seeing the first version of the feature successfully reduce the impact of reply all storms within Microsoft (humans still behave like humans no matter which company they work for and believe it will also benefit many other organisations as well

Microsoft Spokesperson

Although no official timeline has been announced relating to the release, Microsoft did confirm they plan to fine tune and upgrade the Reply All Storm Protection feature to help protect a wider range of Office 365 users

We are considering possible future enhancements to improve our reply all storm detection accuracy, add admin customisable thresholds and block duration, as well as producing reply all storm reports and notifications