It seems that a recent ‘reply-all storm’ at the State Department caused the entire e-mail infrastructure to crash. A notice sent to all State Department employees warned of disciplinary actions which will be taken if users “reply-all” to lists with a large amount of users. Apparently, the problem was compounded by not only angry replies asking to be taken off the errant list, but by the e-mail recall function, which generated further e-mail traffic. —Slashdot

Looks like this instance may represent a violation of #10 Show Respect and Restraint on the list of 10 e-mail tips (originally submitted by a student in my technical writing class back in 2000, and now one of the most popular pages on my website).