My worst email disaster occurred my first semester college. In fact, it happened on my sister’s birthday (which is in October). To give some background, I was still relatively new to the Internet (I had only been using it for 10 months at this point). I was in awe of the T1 connection in my dorm room. I sent a lot of email. Never forwards or glurge or anything of the like, but I’d side updates on what’s going on and the like on a fairly regular basis. I was great at keeping in touch with my friends via email. Between college friends, high school buddies, and e-friends from my AOL days, I had a large address book (about 50 to 60 people).
So, like I said, it’s the evening of my sister’s birthday. In her honor, I send out an email with a copy of “Who’s On First?” in it (written out, not a mp3 or anything). This was the first time I had ever sent out an email with a massive recipient list (almost the entire address book). Something happened when I told Outlook Express (way back with the version that came with IE 3.0) to send. I don’t know if it was Outlook Express, my computer, or something with the campus connection and mail server, but something along the line threw a hissy fit.
I clicked send only once. Everyone on the list got it at least four times. Some people got it as much as eleven times. And the copies didn’t all come at once, no. They came spaced apart by five to ten minutes. The first hint I had about trouble is when my roommate asked me how many times I sent the email. He told me he had four copies of it already. I didn’t think much about it; I just assumed there was a hic-cup somewhere. I didn’t know I was about to thoroughly embarrassed and humiliated by the end of the evening.
So, we have a situation where I sent out a mass email that seems to bombing my friends’ mailboxes. Some of my friends were fed up with me mailing them at all (although they never came out and told me). An email flame war erupts amongst my irritated and thoroughly pissed off friends. I found this out when some of my friends on my floor started coming to me to tell me that people they don’t know (from that large recipient list) are yelling at other people. Basically, some people are taking digs at me with the “Reply to All” function. However, I’m not seeing any of this. All I got sitting in my mailbox were five copies of my original email (I included myself on the recipient list). Turns out that the guy who took the first shot at me removed my email address from the recipient list. He said in the email that he didn’t want the things he was about to say to get back to me.
Well, the chaos lasted about three days. A few people were defending me over email (mostly my floormates in the dorm), a few were begging everyone to stop replying to all, the majority were flaming me and the people defending me. Oh, and one friend decided to slip in a “for sale” ad for his motorcycle to the carnage. All total, my original email spawned a 100+ email flame war, and I didn’t know it until I went home for the weekend and read all the emails my sister had received.
I was so horrified that some of my friends reacted this way, but I was mostly just embarrassed and ashamed I had caused this disaster and gotten called every vile thing humanly imaginable. I spent weeks apologizing and begging forgiveness. Most of my friends accepted my apologize; a few of them never have. Five people reported me to the campus IT department for spamming. I got to have a meeting with a supervisor there, and, thankfully, she took pity on me and believed that I didn’t do this intentionally.
It’s been seven years since that happened, and I’m reminded by a few of my friends every now and then. Every time it’s brought up, I cringe in embarrassment. I haven’t sent out an email to more than about a dozen people at a time since then, and I always think twice about clicking “send” on an email with more than ten people in the recipient list.
(painfully embarrasing to watch.)