Microsoft is launching a new feature to stop reply-all email threads from overwhelming your inbox once and for all

• Microsoft is launching a new Office 365 feature that will block responses to messages on large email distribution lists.
• The feature kicks in when the system receives 10 reply-all responses on a thread with more than 5,000 recipients within 60 minutes.
• Those why try to respond on such a thread will see a message notifying them that their email was not sent because the conversation is too busy.
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

Microsoft is hoping to put an end to those massive reply-all email threads clogging your inbox.

The company is rolling out a new feature for Office 365 geared toward large, company-wide emails that will block responses on messages sent to large distribution lists, ZDNet earlier reported.

The new capability, which the tech giant announced last year, will initially be triggered when it detects 10 reply-all responses to over 5,000 recipients within 60 minutes.

When this happens, Microsoft will block any replies on that thread for four hours. Those who try to respond will see a message notifying them that their email was not sent because the conversation is too busy.

The service will also suggest that users try replying to or forwarding the message to a smaller group of people rather than the entire chain. Microsoft also says that it plans to tweak and fine-tune the feature in the future.

The update should fix an annoyance that has plagued office inboxes for years. As career coach Barbara Pachter previously told Business Insider's Allana Akhtar and Marguerite Ward, you should really only hit the reply all button if you're positive that everyone on the email chain needs to see your message.

It's an issue that Microsoft is all too familiar with. Last year, more than 11,000 employees found themselves trapped in a reply-all storm. Microsoft has already been using the new feature internally, the company said.

"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 organizations as well," the company wrote in a blog post.

Aside from the new addition to Office 365, both Microsoft and Google offer the ability to ignore or mute irrelevant conversations in their respective email tools.

Read the original article on Business Insider