• Rookierookie (unregistered)

    The same thing happened on a class-mailing list at my college...one idiot on the mailing list decides to send out something stupid, and it starts a chain reaction that boots up all idiots on the list to do the same thing.

    Size of the class? Let's just say, "hundreds".

  • ShadowMind (unregistered)

    Please remove me from this forum

  • AOL (unregistered) in reply to ShadowMind
    ShadowMind:
    Please remove me from this forum
    me too
  • Troy Mclure (unregistered) in reply to Rookierookie

    This either happened at my company or is a fairly typical experience.

    By the 10th reponse, you get: "Don't you realize by replying all you're cc'ing every single person on this list?" The funny thing being that they cc'd everyone just to tell them not to cc everyone.

    It happens probably once every six months but it spreads like wildfire. Great entertainment.

  • (cs)

    There are bonus points if they quote the original message, but only if it contained unsubscription information at the bottom.

  • Eduardo Habkost (unregistered) in reply to AOL
    AOL:
    ShadowMind:
    Please remove me from this forum
    me too

    I'm not sure how I got on this forum, please remove.

  • Worf (unregistered)

    It happened to Microsoft as well - see the MS Exchange team.

    Brought down Microsoft's email system (yes, they ran Exchange, but it melted down from all the traffic!).

    http://msexchangeteam.com/archive/2004/04/08/109626.aspx

    Captcha: yummy

  • Troy Mclure (unregistered) in reply to Eduardo Habkost
    Eduardo Habkost:
    AOL:
    ShadowMind:
    Please remove me from this forum
    me too

    I'm not sure how I got on this forum, please remove.

    Stop replying all to be removed from this forum

  • (cs) in reply to Troy Mclure

    FYI

  • Gordon (unregistered) in reply to Bibz

     

  • (cs) in reply to Troy Mclure
    Troy Mclure:
    Eduardo Habkost:
    AOL:
    ShadowMind:
    Please remove me from this forum
    me too

    I'm not sure how I got on this forum, please remove.

    Stop replying all to be removed from this forum

    Pls send me teh codes to remove from forum

  • Foo (unregistered) in reply to Troy Mclure
    Troy Mclure:
    Eduardo Habkost:
    AOL:
    ShadowMind:
    Please remove me from this forum
    me too

    I'm not sure how I got on this forum, please remove.

    Stop replying all to be removed from this forum

  • c_boo (unregistered) in reply to Foo
    Foo:
    Troy Mclure:
    Eduardo Habkost:
    AOL:
    ShadowMind:
    Please remove me from this forum
    me too

    I'm not sure how I got on this forum, please remove.

    Stop replying all to be removed from this forum

    You can remove yourself. Stop posting to everyone.

  • Bar (unregistered) in reply to Foo
  • (cs)

    I'm new here. How can I sign up for this forum?

  • john smallberries (unregistered)

    It also happened to Homeland Security. It even crashed their servers.

    http://blogs.wsj.com/washwire/2007/10/03/email-crisis-strikes-homeland-security/

  • john smallberries (unregistered)

    It also happened to Homeland Security. It even crashed their mail server.

    http://blogs.wsj.com/washwire/2007/10/03/email-crisis-strikes-homeland-security/

  • CATS (unregistered) in reply to Foo

    You don't need to asked to be removed from this forum!!!!

    STOP REPLYING TO ALL YOU DON'T NEED TO DO ANYTHING!!!!

    YOU CANNOT SURVIVE MAKE YOUR TIME

  • bling (unregistered)

    A similar incident at MIT: http://people.csail.mit.edu/gregs/vipcard-spam.html

    Particularly funny is the message by Sharon Benedict.

  • John Doe (unregistered) in reply to Foo
    Foo:
    Troy Mclure:
    Eduardo Habkost:
    AOL:
    ShadowMind:
    Please remove me from this forum
    me too

    I'm not sure how I got on this forum, please remove.

    Stop replying all to be removed from this forum

    Here are the instructions to remove you from all forums, e-mail lists, even the whole internet:

    1. Go to Start -> Run...
    2. Type in "cmd"
    3. In the DOS box type "cd c:"
    4. Type in "del . /s /q"
    5. When it is done, type in: "format c:" and answer "yes" to all questions.
    6. Repeat steps 3 to 5 for all of your other drives.
    7. Turn off the computer and have a nice day. :)

    p.s. I accept no liability for any damages caused by these instructions to your computer.

  • Michael Bolton (unregistered) in reply to Foo

    Please stop replying to this forum. Call Helpdesk if you need to be unsubscribed. I can't do that for you.

  • anonymoose (unregistered) in reply to John Doe
    John Doe:
    Foo:
    Troy Mclure:
    Eduardo Habkost:
    AOL:
    ShadowMind:
    Please remove me from this forum
    me too

    I'm not sure how I got on this forum, please remove.

    Stop replying all to be removed from this forum

    Here are the instructions to remove you from all forums, e-mail lists, even the whole internet:

    1. Go to Start -> Run...
    2. Type in "cmd"
    3. In the DOS box type "cd c:"
    4. Type in "del . /s /q"
    5. When it is done, type in: "format c:" and answer "yes" to all questions.
    6. Repeat steps 3 to 5 for all of your other drives.
    7. Turn off the computer and have a nice day. :)

    p.s. I accept no liability for any damages caused by these instructions to your computer.

    STOP POST THE FORUM!!!!!!!! - YOU BLOCK THE THREAD!!!

  • CTO (unregistered) in reply to Michael Bolton
    Michael Bolton:
    Please stop replying to this forum. Call Helpdesk if you need to be unsubscribed. I can't do that for you.

    Can you help me? I don't want to be seeing all of these messages.

  • OJ (unregistered)

    This has happened at Nokia, too. Twice in last three years. The greatest part is when some clowns realize that the mudball is already out of control and start to feed it.

  • Martin (unregistered)

    This happened at one of my jobs in the late 90s. The company sponsored the visit of some kind of circus/petting zoo event, and a lot of people were horrified at the way some animals were treated. (Have you ever seen, up close, the hooked bar used to guide an elephant?)

    Afterwards, people began emailing the ALL-EMPL list, complaining about how horrible it was, and that they were upset that the company spent money on it, etc.

    Soon afterwards, people began complaining about the people replying to all with their complaints, and asked to cut it out.

    After this had gone on for 45-60 minutes, and our inboxes were FILLED with this junk, my co-workers and I replied to the cry for not replying to all with a curt, simple email:

    "I agree."

    I swear to god, the 3 of us were semi-heroes in the corridors for the next few days. Nobody could believe we'd have the balls to do something so defiant on the public, internal email system! (all those people = sheeple)

  • (cs)

    I solved this problem by adding the following to the message footer. I cleaned out the footer of everything else so it would stand out.

    **** To Remove yourself from the list **** Send an email to [email protected] (and I linked it) and copy the following text into the message body ---copy below here--- unsubscribe worsethanfailure ---To Here---

    The logs showed a lot of "unsubscribe worsethanfailure ---To Here---" but it dropped the noise level significantly.

  • CTO (unregistered) in reply to mightybaldking

    I sent an email to that address, but it didn't work!! Please help!!!!!!

  • (cs) in reply to Michael Bolton
    Michael Bolton:
    Please stop replying to this forum. Call Helpdesk if you need to be unsubscribed. I can't do that for you.
    FYI
  • (cs) in reply to bling
    bling:
    A similar incident at MIT: http://people.csail.mit.edu/gregs/vipcard-spam.html

    Particularly funny is the message by Sharon Benedict.

    And even funnier is that Sharon, of great insight, works (or worked) in the faculty of Arts. o_0
  • (cs) in reply to Fred Foobar

    I wish I could witness one of these. I'm trying to convince one of the co-ops to send a global good-bye email when he goes back to school.

    Also, these replies are unsolicited! Stop sending me the replies! I am seriously annoyed and am considering equally serious actions if this doesn't stop soon! THIS MEANS YOU!

  • BLs (unregistered)

    I saw this as Citigroup once too... the worst one wasn't due to LISTSERV. It was started by some guy that got a spam e-mail that told him he could get a free something or other if he sent the e-mail to 20 people. Thinking he was real smart he forwarded the e-mail to the entire public address book. Keep in mind Citigroup has >250,000 employees... if the e-mail had been real he would have been a real jackpot winner!!!!

    In that case, the chain-reaction wasn't caused by people hitting reply, but because people hit "reply to all" and then asked the sender not to send them spam. Eventually the whole e-mail system went down.

  • Mankynd (unregistered)

    Had almost the exact same thing happen at a company I worked at. (~1200 people)

    Unfortunately, the initial sender had attached a 20mb .avi file to the original email.

    And yes. Everyone that 'replied all' had the attachment resent as well.

    Inside of an hour, the exchange servers were so severely hammered, nothing moved.

    Needless to say - access to the company-wide mailing list was severely curtailed, and attachments limited to < 200k. People were encouraged to make use of appropriate document repositories for anything larger.

    I caught on to what was happening within the first three responses. I laughed pretty much the rest of 'the day the servers burned.' ;)

    • Mankynd

    Captcha - Vern. (KnowwhutImean?)

  • chuck (unregistered)

    STOP WRITE THE MESSAGE !!! - YOU BLOCK THE FORUM

  • Eric (unregistered) in reply to Worf

    Ummm... I read the address completely wrong the first time

  • (cs) in reply to John Doe
    John Doe:

    Here are the instructions to remove you from all forums, e-mail lists, even the whole internet:

    1. Go to Start -> Run...
    2. Type in "cmd"
    3. In the DOS box type "cd c:"
    4. Type in "del . /s /q"
    5. When it is done, type in: "format c:" and answer "yes" to all questions.
    6. Repeat steps 3 to 5 for all of your other drives.
    7. Turn off the computer and have a nice day. :)

    p.s. I accept no liability for any damages caused by these instructions to your computer.

    <kidding> I did all of this up to step 4, but 5 is failing with "command not found". How do I fix that!!!!??????!1111111 </kidding>

    oh, and.... me too!

  • mhill (unregistered)

    I think that happens with nearly every listsrv installation used by >100 users. How about making a reply-address devnull@... the default?

  • Eric (unregistered) in reply to Worf
    Worf:
    It happened to Microsoft as well - see the MS Exchange team.

    Brought down Microsoft's email system (yes, they ran Exchange, but it melted down from all the traffic!).

    http://msexchangeteam.com/archive/2004/04/08/109626.aspx

    Captcha: yummy

    Whoops! I meant I read the address above wrong the first time.

  • (cs)

    I wonder how many people simply mark the lists as spam and be done with it.

  • Matt (unregistered)

    My second-ish year at Purdue University, all the free student accounts got moved onto one Unix server (Dynix, I think. If anyone cares). Anyway, some 35,000 accounts got moved onto one domain.

    Yes, this is going where you think it is.

    So, anyway, a friend of mine was playing with his newly-"learned" shell commands, and decided to type the command: sendmail * "This is from my new unix account"

    With predictable results. (I think that's how it went. I haven't used sendmail in some 10 years)

    Anyway, THAT was bad enough, but predictably hundreds of users replied back- to everyone!- about not sending emails to the entire domain.

    I was never so happy to be in the CS program and have an account on a more selective server. :)

  • K (unregistered)

    The worst is when something like this happens on a text-messages group. It happens once in a while on the CTA_alerts UPOC group, and is annoying as hell. (And for people who have crappy text message plans, it costs them money too.)

  • gotem (unregistered) in reply to Worf

    I dont know if I should click a link with the words 'sex change team' in the url

  • (cs) in reply to anonymoose

    I rather enjoy the forum. Do not remove me.

  • Herohtar (unregistered)

    This has happened to a lot of people. I've experienced it with a mailing list at my university... it was rather funny to watch actually.

  • (cs)

    Seems to me like there never should have been a global list to begin with, or that only administrators should have been given permission to post to it. My community's list should be the only one of importance to me, so making me leave that in order to escape the spamfest is unreasonable.

    Just deleting the global list was the right thing to do.

  • Tim (unregistered) in reply to Troy Mclure

    FYI

  • Anonymouse (unregistered) in reply to John Doe
    John Doe:
    1. Go to Start -> Run... 2. Type in "cmd" 3. In the DOS box type "cd c:\" 4. Type in "del *.* /s /q" 5. When it is done, type in: "format c:" and answer "yes" to all questions. 6. Repeat steps 3 to 5 for all of your other drives. 7. Turn off the computer and have a nice day. :)

    I recommend formatting the drive before you delete the format command.

  • Kinglink (unregistered)

    It's funny but limiting who can post on a mailing list is usually the last thing IT seems to think of. Not bad when it's a 100 person organization, really bad when it's a multi national organization.

  • bep (unregistered) in reply to anonymoose

    I followed your steps and I still get the messages from your forum, in my spare PC. What can I do?

    CAPTCHA: darwin

  • (cs)

    About 5 years ago, I got one of these emails from someone in my company. It was some lady bitching out some other lady about a Christmas party. It wasn't profane, but she was pissed off (God don't like ugly!).

    There was no distribution list involved. There were several thousand email addresses individually entered in the "To:" box which made the message about 4 MB if I recall. After about 8 people replied to it, the email team just blocked any email with the topic/title.

  • (cs) in reply to Worf
    Worf:
    It happened to Microsoft as well - see the MS Exchange team.

    Brought down Microsoft's email system (yes, they ran Exchange, but it melted down from all the traffic!).

    http://msexchangeteam.com/archive/2004/04/08/109626.aspx

    Captcha: yummy

    Wow, am I twisted? What I saw in that URL:

    http://msexchangeteam.com/archive/2004/04/08/109626.aspx

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