How to mute endless Gmail threads so you're not stuck in a 'reply all' hell

"It sucks when you're stuck on an email thread of declining relevance," writes office culture expert Jocelyn K. Glei in "Unsubscribe: How to kill email anxiety, avoid distractions, and get real work done."

Glei offers a graceful way of escaping a thread by saying this: "Looks like you guys have taken the reins on this conversation! Would you mind moving me to 'bcc' so that I can bow out?"

If the chain isn't work-related, however, Glei gives a more personal example to keep things amiable: "Sean — Would you mind moving me to 'bcc' when you respond? I'm waging war on inbox clutter this week. ;)"

You may end up in a hellish echo chamber with a million people asking to be let out, like NHS employees were in 2016. The UK health service's 1.2 million employees received a "test" email, which caused some of them to hit "reply all," asking to be taken off the recipient list. Since a single email in the thread reaches 1.2 million accounts, NHS's servers slowed down considerably when dozens of annoyed employees sent a collective 140 million emails.

The same thing happened to 11,543 Microsoft employees last January, when an employee reportedly sent out a message to the entire company explaining how to change their GitHub accounts to get fewer notifications.

The irony was not lost on employees, one of whom described the fiasco as a "reply allpocalypse." The moral of the story: don't, under any circumstances, hit "reply all" to thousands of people.