We use MS365 at work and colleagues “react” in Outlook with thumbs-up to my emails sometimes. Fine, I guess it is a lightweight way to signal support or agreement. Not too different from reactions in Teams or Slack.

BUT… there is a keyboard shortcut to do it, apparently, that is not too far from my typical typing pattern. Because sometimes I end up sending a thumbs-up reaction email when I did not mean to.

This is incredibly awkward when it goes to some random external partner or vendor. And especially when I’m in the process of drafting a serious reply. One time a vendor saw from me: thumbs-up email, thumbs-up email, serious email dinging them for messing something up. The first two were accidents and could not be stopped or recalled.

I asked our IT team and apparently there is no MS setting to prevent these email reactions from going external. Which is insane because the internal/external email boundary is so fundamental to the MS365 value prop and security model.