Is it possible to slip out of the CC field in a mail conversation?

Question

Sometimes mail conversations get out of hand. If you're in the CC field and folks keep hitting reply-all you'll keep getting all the e-mails. Now suppose you've lost interest in this mail conversation and any follow-ups (perhaps it turned into a "favorite christmas song mailthread"): how can you slip out of this thread?

The only thing I could think of was ask a colleague that's also in the thread to "sacrifice" him/herself by hitting reply-all and removing your address from the CC field. That's not really a solution though, because it's not something you can do yourself.

PS. In my specific situation we all have inboxes on the same Exchange server (and my client is MS Outlook 2010) - but preferably an answer would also work if non-exchange mailboxes are involved.

Answer 1

You could try to reply all and mess with the reply-to address. This might work. But hacky. And not even sure how easy it is.

The neater solution would I suppose be similar to gmails mute feature. You can see if your client has a feature/plugin which does this. Outlook appears to have something similar, from this About.com page (not exactly the same though)

A person has gone to the trouble of coding up an exact emulation of mute for outlook 2003.

Answer 2

You have identified the only practical way of doing this as it's a human problem rather than a computer problem.

People often hit "reply-all" without realising and/or checking who's actually in the cc list, so unless someone makes the effort to trim the list or only hit "reply" you are stuck.

You could set up a filter that moves all e-mails you are cc'd on to a different folder. This would remove the immediate problem but has the drawback that you could miss important e-mails as well - unless you checked that folder regularly.