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Admin
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Company I worked for a while back provided a software product that offered customers' monthly data to be viewed or downloaded. This was obviously an explicitly opt-in system - you had to buy the service in order to receive notification that your data was available. Yet we continually got "please remove me from this list" messages from various lUsers - enough that we had one individual on the helpdesk whose job was to call these individuals and remind them that these e-mails were part of the service they had ordered.
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HOW DO I GET OUT OF HERE!!!??????????????????????????
DSIEWDS949USCF DKS VJER9U[9U32EWFJDS'CV
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This happened with my ISP in Sri Lanka.... they had an address like [email protected] that they used to send notices out to. Someone replied to that mail, everyone go it... then people started replying with "why did i get this mail?"
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At my first job, we were a small shop that eventually got bought by a national corporation, and thus added to the global mailing list. It was a rather spammy corporate culture, with people sending inane comments to all-emp over the silliest things. One day, to 'protest' this behavior, some sales guy in Cleveland sent out a message about what he was going to order for lunch. The predictable landslide followed. Since all hell had already broken loose, I too responded and recommended that this invidual have Spam for lunch.
That's not the funny part. The funny part is that I got an irate E-mail from a lab tech four states away (I was in New Jersey) complaining in broken English about how all these new mail alerts were keeping him from getting any work done. The kicker is, he demanded to know the name of my supervisor so that he could have me reprimanded.
Yea. I'll get right on that.
Admin
These instructions did not work for me. Please just REMOVE me from this forum.
Admin
These directions did not work for me
Admin
I was working at company in the 90s that had about 5000 people on campus. Some of the tech guys were playing with the 'net send' command passing messages back and forth. One guy decided to get in on the action and sent a message with the imperative "Stop beating off over there!" or something similar. Unfortunately for him he messed up the syntax of the command and sent it to the entire domain, all 5000 of them. He was gone by the end of the day.
Admin
At a certain military base where I worked, one of the admins decided to test net send. So he did a net send to the whole domain with a message "Please call XXX at XXX." (using his name and extension.) The base had over 20,000 computers. His voice mail filled up rapidly.
The biggest WTF was that he did the same thing a couple months later (same message even) meaning to send it to a small group. We wasn't the brightest spark.
Admin
By the way, nice Willie Wonka reference.
Admin
Similar thing happened at my workplace (a big investment bank, 2000 people approx). Somebody sent spam to an email address that was forwarded to everyone in the bank. So the spam filter caught it, and everyone got a message saying "You have got this email, we think it is spam". So, everybody answered. Most people started saying "Remove me from this list". About 20 minutes and A LOT of mails sent to everybody, the thing stopped. And about 10 minutes later, somebody, with an outside email, sent an email saying "I haven't received the emails from this list, could somebedy please add me to it?". You could hear laughs on any corridor in the bank.
Admin
http://www.unicom.com/pw/reply-to-harmful.html
See in particular the section titled:
Principle of Least Damage
Admin
Been there, done that, got the tee-shirt.
Another story: a ways back, I worked for a small network operations center which maintained an e-mail distribution list. I call it a distribution list, but it was actually just an entry in an alias file on our mail server. There were probably about 100 people on the "list". Its primary purpose was to announce network outages, so it was really only about two people who were posting regularly, and a half-dozen who were supposed to post at all.
I suggested switching over to a genuine list management program, but my boss waved me off, saying that they were too complicated and prone to attack. (Evidently, "apt-get install mailman" and the attendant configuration was beyond his comprehension.)
Then, an admin who was privvy to that mail distribution got hit by a virus which sent out a ton of messages from his account. Some of them actually had a payload, which was fortunately scrubbed, but there was also just a lot of random crap that everyone got hit with. Boss being out at the time, Boss' Boss wanted to know why we didn't have better control over our distribution list. So I told him about my idea to get Mailman set up, along with the warning that Boss didn't want me to. Boss' Boss said, "Do it." So I did.
Later, in a staff meeting, Boss had the gall to call me out on this. And I was home sick. So it was up to my friend to point out that I'd been ordered to do it...
Admin
Do you suppose those are those real email addresses in the word doc?
http://people.csail.mit.edu/gregs/vipcard-spam.html
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Please remove me from this running joke.
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WHAT YOU SAY!!!!
Admin
Through being in exactly the same situation is how I discovered my favorite phrase:
"The more you complain the longer God lets you live."
Admin
Back in the day, the Media Lab at MIT had a "bozo-users" mailing list precisely for these people. Whenever someone sent a "please remove me from this list" message to another list, some kind-hearted BOFH somewhere would add that user to the bozo-users mailing list.
Those were the only members of the bozo-users list; it had no other purpose besides getting all these people to annoy each other with their remove requests.
Removing yourself was very simple if you just read the message headers, but these folks couldn't be bothered with that.
Admin
Okay, better details: it was called mailing-list-bozos
http://www.ornl.gov/lists/mailing-lists/qmail/1997/01/msg00099.html
Admin
My school did a few dumb things along this line. They had set up an address allstudents@xxxxx, but this was only supposed to be known to a few select network administrators. Except one of these geniuses sent an email describing it to that address instead of to the person they meant to send to. So now everyone knows this address and they haven't even bothered to change it.
Later, someone else - who apparently didn't know about this - wanted to send an email to every student. So what did they do? CC every student, of course. So now everyone has this nice convenient list of the names and emails of every student on campus, which is supposed to be private information.
Surprisingly, nobody has abused the allstudents address yet, and only one idiot replied to the second message. (And yes, they left all those addresses in the CC field.) Perhaps this is just because nobody actually reads these accounts.
Admin
I was at a large computer manufacturer in Houston in the early eighties, where a user send out an Xmas email to all users with a fairly large attachment(they used Banyan mail so all the users address was a simple @.@.@) which went to 20K+ users and started crashing mail servers due to out of disk space errors.
Nothing special about this BUT after the admins tracked her down and explained what she had done, she promptly send out an apology to .... @.@.@
Shortly there after the ability for any user to use @.@.@ was removed.
Admin
_ EVERYONE PLEASE STOP THIS ISNT FUNNY ANYMORE YOUR RUINING THE FORUM _
and please rmeove me form this list to
Admin
College I went to:
Discovering all the email addresses on the "all students" list was a simple CAT away. And since the email addresses and UNIX names were linked, you could pull up names with finger.
They did restrict accounts that could send to various lists, though - by use of a "magic string" that had to be present in the original email, which I'm sure on more than one occasion was accidentally sent to the list.
They now use Exchange, which may actually be an improvement...
Admin
Would a couple of lines of sanity checking code in the email client, along with a dialog box that said - "You are about to send this email to 10031 reciepients. Are you sure?" - prevent this sort of problem???
Admin
ABSOLUTELY! Because there's nothing I want more than to tell 10031 people of the Good News!
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WHY DID I GET THIS MESSAGE. I'M NOT PART OF THIS GROUP
Admin
unsubscribe worsethanfailure ---To Here---
The logs showed a lot of "unsubscribe worsethanfailure
Admin
A coworker subscribed to a coupon/deal site for daily emails. This created all sorts of fun when she went on vacation and set up an automated "out of office" message. Problem was, our email server was, well, stupid....
First day she was gone, she got an email with a deal. Our email server replied with her "out of office" email. The deal site replied with a "please do not reply to this email" message. To which our email server replied with her "out of office" message. And the deal site replied with another "please do not reply to this email" message.... This went on for more than a week.
When she got back to work, her email inbox had over 9,000 messages, with many from our email server stating she was exceeding her storage restrictions...
Two days and a mess-load of deleted messages later, she had functioning email again.
Admin
How many people want to try this on a big mailing list they're on?
Admin
We get these at work when someone leaves. They send out a "goodbye email" saying something along the lines of "it's been great working with all of you (5 people) these last few years (6 months) please keep in touch (remember me and hire me back someday, please god)".
Invariably someone emails back a "great working with you!" - again to the entire company.
Admin
please do not reply to this forum
Admin
No, because people are well-trained to click "yes" any time their computer asks them a question.
Admin
This happens on a regular basis at MIT. Every time some silly frosh loses (or occasionally finds) a cell phone, purse, etc., they decide it would be a good idea to send mail to every undergraduate dorm mailing list (about 4000 people). Every time this happens (once or twice a month), it spawns a 50-100 mail spam war.
Admin
Admin
I take it that you don't buy pens from Pen Island?
Admin
TRWTF
Admin
It helps the case where you have CC'd everyone, but that's not the common case. Maybe some heuristic ("list" in the address or something), but it's not a trivial matter. (Unless the mail headers contain information I'm not privy to.)
Admin
To remove yourself from this running joke, reply to this message with REMOVE in the subject.
Admin
To remove yourself from this forum please follow the following steps:
These details are needed for verification so the program can properly remove you.
I am a super programmer from Microsoft so I think I'd know what I'm doing. Send it now and you'll see a pink bunny hop across your screen as a bonus.
Admin
REMOVE
Admin
Blah blah blah am I removed yet?
Admin
I did it to, and it worked! Thanks to this fantastic service, I was no longer able to afford an internet connection :) Or electricity, or a roof above my head for that matter. But at least I can enjoy the warmth of the fire of all credit card bills my former landlord is dumping at my temporary residence under the bridge.
Admin
Don't you realize that by quoting this message, you are replying to the whole forum?!
Admin
TL:DR
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Maybe one day you can rent a room in my Nigerian mansion.
Admin
Reminds me of "cancel google"
http://www.ok-cancel.com/archives/link/2004/09/google-answers-hci-phd-program.html
Admin
Sounds like you need a visit to http://www.penisland.com (safe link i promise!)
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er...actually that's a junk link, I meant
http://www.penisland.net/
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Frist!1one ...Oh, crap.
Uh, me too.
Admin
This is late, but... the M Sex Change Team?