I work for the Government of Alberta, there are about 20,000 of us in the various departments. Last night some spammer sent about 10 emails to everyone in the GOA about a fake job.
This morning, all hell broke loose. People started replying to the spam, asking to be taken off the mailing list but they would reply to all. So suddenly everyone’s inbox got flooded with “REMOVE ME FROM YOUR MAILING LIST AT ONCE!!” Over and over with minor variations and then some people would reply all to the “remove me…” with “Yeah me too!!” and “I Agree, stop sending me stuff!”.
Then we got flooded with “People, stop replying to all! You’re flooding everybody’s inbox!” as they replied to all. It got crazier and crazier with “STOP REPLYING ALL, IT’S GOING TO EVERYONE!!!”
This went on for hours. Even people on my own floor were sending the “Remove me from your list!” All over the floor you could hear people shouting “STOP REPLYING!!!” and “WHAT THE HELL, PEOPLE!!!”
I got booted out of outlook repeatedly, outside emails couldn’t get in as people kept spamming themselves. It was annoying, then it eventually became so funny. Some of the people were head administrators, executive directors, lawyers…
How can so many people be so completely retarded???
This happened at my company 6 months ago, when a new tech mistakenly sent an email company-wide instead of department-wide. On a normal work day I get 5-10 emails. I got nearly 500 that day: half were people asking to be removed from the list, half were people using reply-all to complain that nobody at the company knew how to use reply-all :rolleyes:, and one agent who used reply-all to threaten legal action for unsolicited spam, to the tune of $50 per occurrence, for “business interruption.”
That was a fun day! I hope that agent got dressed down by his supervisor, though. He was a self-important dick.
I remember a lovely incident. I was at a major biomedical research institution, and the lists were set up with limited access, so that only specific people could insert them. This meant that even if you hit “Reply all”, if you didn’t have the authorization to insert the list, it would only send an email to the originator. The fun started when the IT department, of all people, sent out a advertisement for their services to the campus-wide list with the “reply” field set to… the campus-wide list. So perfectly legitimate replies (NOT reply-alls) went out campus-wide, which caused a bunch of “unsubscribe” replies, and the process snowballed. By about 20 minutes into this mess, the entire campus was getting several new messages per minute. The IT department desperately slapped a temporary hold on the email servers so that they could hand-filter the messages.
I hope they made the bozo who sent out the original email read every single one of them.
I was there on the day that the I Love You virus hit the company I was working for at the time.
Fortunately, being in Japan, I got dozens of emails when I first signed on, making me suspicious. Also fortunately for everyone, the VP of HR also was infected as well, so she couldn’t very well bitch to everyone else.
I remember the I Love You virus. I happened to be hanging out with the IT people when one of them got an angry phone call shortly after blocking users from opening that attachment. The guy complained that he can’t open this email from the CIO and demanded that it be fixed.
The tech said, “Sir, with all due respect, do you really think the CIO is sending you love letters?”
GAH! I got a bunch of those bloody emails in my Gmail.
Not impressed.
Although I must admit I am pleased my initial assessment of what was happening (stupid government employees responding to spam and making it worse) was correct.
