
40,000 NYU students realize they can 'reply all' to everyone - evolve2k
http://nyulocal.com/on-campus/2012/11/27/replyallcalypse-2012-nyu-local-explains-why-your-inbox-was-blowing-up-last-night/
======
patmcguire
I once had two gmail addresses forwarding to each other on accident. If you're
wondering if Google has some sort of check for that, the answer, at least at
the time, was several million nos.

~~~
devcpp
I stupidly tried to do that some time ago (got confused juggling with my
spammed mail addresses that are all forwarding to my main email address), and
Google told me it was a bad idea.

~~~
yitchelle
Was that just a warning from Google, but still allow you to do it?

------
diminoten
Back when Reddit was younger, there was a guy named P-Dub who needed some
help. I forget the actual reason he needed help, but people ended up donating
some money to him, and all was good.

A few days later, P-Dub's mother decides to email everyone who helped P-Dub.
Guess what she did (or forgot to do).

The fallout resulted in people _begging_ to be let off the reply-all list, and
for weeks no such mercy was granted.

It took a few months before everything settled down, and to this very day,
someone on the list (of only ~100 people or so) will occasionally start it up
again.

~~~
chewxy
Funny I have always remembered P-Dub as the guy whom you tell to do his
homework if you ever see him on reddit. I think you're thinking of the soap
guy.

~~~
citricsquid
P-Dub is the same guy, there was later some fallout re: donation situation.
His "fame" through the homework _meme_ and a few other things was what allowed
him to be the subject of such "support" from the _community_.

------
quant18
Certain US government mailing lists have this same problem. For example, the
Federal Register table of contents listserv, which sends out daily mails
consisting of links to government notices. Every few weeks, lawyers all over
the country — plus us random wonks who also read the Federal Register for fun
— get an autoreply from some other law firm telling us who quit or got laid
off:
[http://listserv.access.gpo.gov/scripts/wa.exe?A2=ind1210C...](http://listserv.access.gpo.gov/scripts/wa.exe?A2=ind1210C&L=FEDREGTOC-L&F=&S=&P=7929)

I'm only surprised it doesn't happen more often. I guess, given the intended
audience, it's not so surprising that it doesn't get abused. But still, it
would be incredibly easy to send out a fake email pretending to be the Federal
Register. Imagine all the fun you could have issuing your own antidumping
notices and arms control regulations.

~~~
ALee
I've seen it happen at individual federal agencies, but the culture there
keeps people from abusing the lists. I do like how some companies keep spam
lists, like Zynga-Spam was like a targeted comedy feed.

------
MichaelGG
Microsoft had an incident, "Bedlam DL3" which took a couple of days to sort
out. There's a neat writeup with details on the Exchange blog:

[http://blogs.technet.com/b/exchange/archive/2004/04/08/10962...](http://blogs.technet.com/b/exchange/archive/2004/04/08/109626.aspx)

~~~
jbeda
I was there when this was happening and realized exactly what was going on at
the time. Still, it was very very hard not to respond with a 'Stop replying
all' type message. There is something about these things that makes it hard to
just sit it out and shut up (at least for me).

The list had a broad section of the company. It wasn't surprising to see some
of the less computer savvy users responding. I was surprised though when I saw
engineers down the hall responding.

~~~
rubyrescue
i was there too. a really happy memory of a fun day; everyone sitting around
seeing who replied.

------
julesie
When I worked at Accenture this happened at least every 6 months if not more
often.

The replies were typically broken into two camps:

1) Those who, despite the ever growing list of replies, couldn't work out what
was happening and asked for themselves to be removed from the list.

2) Those who understood the phenomenon but added fuel to the fire nonetheless
by sending out a "Would everybody please stop replying all" mail.

Inevitably some more #1's would get confused send more 'please remove me'
mails until a another #2 would complete the cycle once more.

Every. Time.

~~~
mweatherill
My employer is a global IT company and the exact same thing happens on mailing
lists for 10,000+ people. I reply-all to let them know that there is cake in
the lunch room.

------
Piskvorrr
You haven't _really_ been on the Internet unless you've weathered at least one
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Email_storm> ;)

~~~
cryptoz
A related event that happened recently to my girlfriend's dad: He was on
vacation and had his Blackberry or Outlook autoresponder set to respond to
every message (not just once per sender, as I think is normal). Anyway, he
bought a movie ticket online and they sent him an automated email asking not
to reply. His autoresponder responded, and the auto-reply responded in turn
asking him not to email. He turned his phone off after about 10,000 messages
(he was in the movie) and didn't get resolved until he visited the office IT
the following Monday.

~~~
aptwebapps
I would think that a good auto responder would not send a response to the same
email address more than once a day (or some other small number).

~~~
__alexs
Return-Path: <>

------
user24
Actually, this makes me wonder why _every_ institution doesn't have an
unregulated broadcast channel like this. Seems like it's a great way to
embrace community. And I bet you that, if you run it long enough, there'd be
some tangible value come from it, as well as the intangible value of fun.

In physical environments, we all have 'water cooler' conversations all the
time. As we move more into 100% virtuality, is there a need for a digital
analogue (if you'll excuse the somewhat jarring juxtaposition of phrases
there)?

~~~
aes256
It might have some benefit somewhere along the line, but the cost of day-to-
day abuse (or plain old misuse) would be far greater.

Cost-benefit analysis says no.

~~~
user24
And this is how you miss out on the amazing things that can happen when one
part of your organisation starts talking in an unscripted way to another part
that it doesn't normally talk to.

------
fecklessyouth
I go to a small school that still grants all-campus email access to everyone.
It develops a culture of communication all its own, and often hosts vigorous
and even nasty arguments. And while the role it plays could be filled much
better by other technologies, email is a common enough technology that
everyone can take part.

~~~
scottyallen
Which school?

~~~
robbfitzsimmons
I'm not the OP, but this definitely happened several times at Dartmouth
(BlitzMail) when I was there 2006-08.

------
RKoutnik
We've got a similar problem at my (much smaller) school. I've found that most
colleges treat IT as an unfortunate evil, which is reflected in the quality of
services they provide. It's strange how these colleges think they can train us
for the future while ignoring the massive changes technology brings us.

~~~
TallGuyShort
It's not strange at all. Most colleges are that detached from reality.

~~~
HarryHirsch
The reality at most colleges is that money is short. It may be morally
repugnant, but it is what it is.

------
jaimebuelta
In the 2000, I was working on a big telco company. One day, a guy made the
mistake of sending his "hilarious and NSFW" 4 MB PowerPoint presentation email
(that was a huge email back then) to a list including EVERYONE working on the
company. That means around 2K people just on the same building. According to
Wikipedia, right now it has over 250K employees, probably a similar number
back in the day. I don't know how many it has back in the day and were
affected, but it included for sure all the high executives.

Other than the embarrassment of the NSFW material, the network and email were
completely blocked for most part of the day, causing severe troubles, at least
to the whole building were I was working.

The guy was an external consultant which was "moved to a different project"
:-D It was absolutely epic.

------
user24
Reminds me of the time I was volunteering in an office, I must have been 15?
And there was a solar eclipse, so I used "net send" to broadcast "Come and
watch the eclipse on the roof" to every computer in the building. It was
pretty cool; a few dozen people showed up.

------
mkmk
A really amusing writeup of a similar situation can be found on metafilter:
[http://www.metafilter.com/78177/PLEASE-UNSUBSCRIBE-ME-
FROM-T...](http://www.metafilter.com/78177/PLEASE-UNSUBSCRIBE-ME-FROM-THIS-
LIST#2408665)

------
untog
The "pictures of Nic Cage" link refers directly to a Gmail attachment. Not
viewable by me, obviously, but I wonder if there is any information in that
URL that shouldn't be public.

------
incision
Just when I thought I'd rid myself of horrible memories related to running
listproc in the 90s.

------
bsenftner
I bet that one evening will be remembered by the entire student body for the
rest of their lives. I can imagine how much fun that must have been during the
first 1-2 hours, and then how it turned sour hour, after hour, after hour...
fun!

------
finnh
_Suddenly granted an audience, another student voiced the immortal query,
"Would you rather fight 100 duck sized horses, or 1 horse sized duck?"_

------
Wicher
A similar thing has happened at the science faculty of the Universiteit
Utrecht (in the Netherlands; so it's in Dutch):

<http://www.dub.uu.nl/artikel/explosie-beta-mailboxen.html>

Before the faculties (of Physics, Chemistry, etc) were merged into one giant
megafaculty, some of them ran Mailman lists (which were set up properly to
prevent this stuff). The centralization efforts of the board of the university
put an end to that and it was demanded that the new giant uberfaculty would
use MS Exchange servers staffed by equally sophisticated IT personnel… The
board introduced these IT changes using a slogan which for a while became an
in-joke to utter if some IT thing went horribly wrong: "Goed is goed genoeg"
which translates as "Good is good enough".

Source for that quote:

[http://www.ublad.uu.nl/WebObjects/UOL.woa/3/wa/Ublad/archief...](http://www.ublad.uu.nl/WebObjects/UOL.woa/3/wa/Ublad/archief?id=1024335)

------
kokey
I worked at an airline once. Before I joined, a member of staff at a small
airport received an email telling them that Bill Gates will give them $5 to
forward some email. They believed it, and decided to forward it to all the
staff. That was 10,000 people, and sent over an analog leased line.

------
achompas
As an NYU student I was inundated with these messages for a bit. I seriously
thought about replying to all to give everyone step-by-step directions on
creating a Gmail archive filter, but decided it wouldn't really help too much.

~~~
mayneack
Last year here at MIT a bunch of people did that. They also sent out detailed
instructions with links to remove yourself from the list. Didn't work, but
someone killed the list after a few hours.

Great times though.

------
aidanns
This happened at Melbourne Uni this year with a slight twist - the student
support team emailed all-students@unimelb.edu.au (or some variation) letting
them know about the support services the uni had on offer for students in
distress.

Some poor soul (or a skilled troll) replied to the list with an email intended
for the support team itself requesting help with coping with the stress of
exams and uni life, starting a "please remove me from this list" conversation
that went on for a day or two before they closed the list.

Honestly I've never felt so bad for someone in my whole life, although some of
the replies were hilarious.

------
simondlr
Same thing happened at my university. Chair of the student's committee
accidentally included the list as a cc instead of bcc. My brother managed to
rickroll the whole campus.

Soon after the security of the listserv was fixed.

------
pnathan
A sharp operator would figure out how to get a newsgroup going to NYU off of
this incident. I betcha that could be monetized via local ads. :-)

~~~
ct0
go on....

------
chimeracoder
This breaks even the Guinness Book of World Records's email debacle from a few
months back, in which some thousand random Redditors had their emails all
exposed:
[http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/09/05/guinness_world_recor...](http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/09/05/guinness_world_records_email_leak/)

That was.... not a fun day.

~~~
fudged71
I was there!! At least we got free shipping on our Guinness World Record
certificates. I think they were charging $30 or something for it, which was
ridiculous.

------
RandallBrown
One time in college one of these reply all things happened in a chemistry
class of mine with about 600 students. It wasn't enough to take any servers
down, but I did end up with several hundred new emails consisting of "Please
remove me from this list" and "STOP PRESSING REPLY ALL"

I've never understood why people default to reply all to something.

------
brazzy
I once had this happen with Spam. No joke, some spammer sent out their stuff
via a mailing list software with copy-replies-to-all activated. Of course the
same thing happened with the additional factor of people threatening legal
action to fan the flames.

My trust in people's intelligence went down several notches those days...

------
JohnTheRipper
I think OVH had a similar issue back when they were giving away test servers.
I wasn't on the list, but I heard from several people that the official
question/reply address would send emails to everyone on the list. Needless to
say, with several thousand people on there, it got spammy fast.

------
nicholassmith
Way back when I was at Uni the same thing was possible, if I remember rightly
though it took them about 3 days to rectify and we were told to just not use
email during the period. It was pre-meme days so most of it was just random
insults and yo momma jokes.

------
aidenn0
I remember when the admin at work switched the "all staff" from an alias to a
mailing-list, and everyone with their e-mail clients set to default to "reply
to list" kept on accidentally replying to everyone.

------
magikbum
Gmail "Mute" please

------
btrautsc
amazingly this has happened to me @ every career level minus startup...
university constantly between multi-hundred person classes and departments,
multi-thousand person logistics company, and all_the_freaking_time @ HP...
there were probably 5,000+ sales, consultants, solutions people who would
ratchet one of these storms up about every 2 weeks...

------
emurillo510
my CS department chair at San Jose State recently 'reply all' on an email and
ended up sending all currently enrolled CS students information about GPA,
address, phone number, and expected graduation date. All we got back was an
apology letter... At least everyone has my address and I have theirs :P

------
erohead
Ah, just like the awesome engsoc_on_campus escapade at Waterloo in 2006...

------
hornbaker
It'd be pretty awesome if this happened to the Facebook user list.

~~~
fudged71
Like when you could reply to Facebook posts via email?
<http://i.imgur.com/lGQ1Y.jpg> :)

------
Evbn
If they used Twitter and hashtags , they wouldn't have this problem. Only old
people use email.

~~~
TazeTSchnitzel
That's _Shit HN Says_ worthy.

~~~
polyfractal
Yeah, I'm torn between thinking it is sarcastic...or a facepalm and loud sigh.

~~~
TorKlingberg
"Only old people use email" is an old Slashdot joke. I think it started with
this 2004 story: [http://slashdot.org/story/04/11/30/0034259/in-korea-email-
is...](http://slashdot.org/story/04/11/30/0034259/in-korea-email-is-only-for-
old-people)

~~~
philwelch
In Korea, only old people use Slashdot references!

