"On 14 October 1997, a Microsoft employee noticed that they were on an as-yet unknown email distribution list 'Bedlam DL3', and emailed the list asking to be removed. This list contained approximately a quarter of the company's employees, 13,000 email addresses. Other users replied to the list with similar requests and still others responded with pleas to stop replying to the list. A Microsoft employee estimates that 15 million emails were sent, using 195 GB of traffic."
A net plus for Microsoft, I would say.
Seems like they added a limit instead of fixing the actual problem.
edit: Atos that's a new one. But no bananas? I'm disappointed.
The "free bananas in the kitchen" story. http://www.metafilter.com/78177/PLEASE-UNSUBSCRIBE-ME-FROM-T...
You could count on the technologists to not throw gas on the fire by replying (everyone'd heard of Bedlam DL3), but once non-technical sales, trading and ops were on the list, all bets were off.
My university operates such a server and it's heavily used by everyone from department announcements to student organization coordination/discussion.
Has something changed, like better server or client email software? Or perhaps admins and users are more savvy about avoiding this kind of behavior?
(Maybe I've just been lucky to not have to deal with one of these for several years.)
I love it and hate it, I find it laughable that it just keeps on going, but it makes me sad that some humans cannot grasp what they are doing, nor learn from the example, and this is in huge global organisations too, full of supposedly professional, educated people!
My favourite one of all time though is when a reply-all chain (office wide, think 1000+ recipients....) was fully in its stride and someone attached a 10mb animated GIF.
Needless to say, I don't think the people managing the Outlook Exchange servers had a good day that day trying to cope with that one...
Everywhere I've worked email has slowly started taking a back seat to chat clients. Initially it was only email. Lots of Reply Alls. Then most of the places I went to use Google Chat and sometimes you'd just bring in multiple people at once. Hell or even a Google Hangout. Today most seem to go straight for Slack with email being secondary.
I don't think people care about email nearly as much anymore.
In fact, I avoid reading around 80% of my emails. Too much noise not enough signal. The signal usually comes with a lot of human interference making it difficult to figure out what it means.
However, systems which email me things automatically? An, overwhelming amount of noisy emails.
My seventh-best guess: The NYTimes' CMS lacks support for actual footnotes, so linking to another page is the next best thing. But since the footnote doesn't make complete sense unless you've come from the main article, the web editors didn't want the other page to be easily discoverable. Problem is, the CMS automatically makes any article styled as a regular article SEO-friendly, so they decided to work around that by putting the text into a less-SEO-friendly PDF.
No.
By Daniel Victor
O.K., here’s a little more context, for those of you who need it.
It begins when an innocuous email that you probably don’t need lands in your inbox (as it did mine on Thursday).
Soon someone inevitably replies (all): “Please remove me from this email chain.”
Then another: “Unsubscribe.”
Soon, dozens of people are replyingall, sending their fruitless requests to people who are equally annoyed. Notifications on your phone won’t stop buzzing.
This is known as the dreaded replyallpocalypse.
When you are in this situation, the logical, expert opinion is: Do not hit “reply all.”
You will only make things worse.
Another option: If you’re using Gmail, you could mute the conversation and go on with your day.
Otherwise, hunker down. We’re all in this together, and it’ll all be over soon.
So basically every time someone had something they needed to discuss with the dept admin after an email blast went out, they would end up sending their response to the entire CS class. No matter how many times it happened, there would always be that one person who hadn't yet learned not to reply to the email blasts.
Why does such an email list even exist? For some kind of HR emergency? Aren't there other emergency messaging systems that could be more effective?
Still NO.
