

We made a mistake - geerlingguy
http://royal.pingdom.com/2012/12/21/we-made-a-mistake/

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geerlingguy
I think something like this has happened to just about every developer I know.
I remember when I was getting ready to launch a revamped version of a service
I was working on, the night before launch, when I was migrating all the users
from the old version to the new, I accidentally left emails turned on, and
fired off about 9,000 welcome emails (which were only supposed to go out to
new members) before realizing what was going on. The next day was not so
happy. Even with a follow-up email explaining the error, a few users decided
to leave the service because of that (harmless) mistake.

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lutusp
> By mistake, we also included a limited number of our other customer’s email
> addresses in the To: field of those emails.

That's never a mistake. E-mails should never have more than one visible
address, and this cannot happen by accident. More here:

<http://arachnoid.com/opinion/help_the_crooks.html>

> ... and the number of email addresses that was included in the To: field was
> 5,511.

Jesus Christ. This is like calling the Hindenburg disaster an aerial mishap.

~~~
geerlingguy
Well, if they're using systems like Amazon SES for delivery, they might've
been trying to save some processing time and bandwidth by combining multiple
recipients in one email (this is a perfectly normal way to send group emails).
The key, though, is to put the extra recipients in the BCC field. My
speculation is that this was a rookie mistake (maybe an intern or new hire
tasked with the Christmas email?), or maybe Pingdom isn't used to sending
marketing/mass emails. (Most of their emails are transactional, at least as
far as I know).

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thomasvendetta
Mistakes happen.

