40,000 NYU students realize they can 'reply all' to everyone | Hacker News Reader

40,000 NYU students realize they can 'reply all' to everyone

nyulocal.com

153 pointsevolve2k76 comments

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.

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.

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

A student group I was a sysadmin for had partially switched to Google Apps for mail from a self-hosted mail server, but for those who were still on the local server, some of them had set up their email to simply forward to their university address. University addresses expire an undetermined time after you graduate, so eventually when this happened to someone who had setup forwarding, it would trigger a horrendous forwarding loop of bounce notifications which would forward back and forth between our server and the university server and rather quickly fill up our (fairly small) mail partition and crash the whole machine. Thankfully these days everyone is on Google Apps so if they're doing forwarding they're doing it through that and thus I don't think you get bounce loops, and most people just check that address directly anyway.

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.

Haha good times. The donation was actually for P-Dub's mom. It was P-Dub who set up the email for his mom and failed to put the email list in bcc. I had to set up a gmail filter to get out of that madness.

Reminded me of the Multi-National Banana War http://www.metafilter.com/78177/PLEASE-UNSUBSCRIBE-ME-FROM-T...

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.

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.

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...

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.

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.

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...

(former Exchange team member here)

It turns out that, for most people (in a corporate setting at least--not sure about college campuses), the problem is that they don't even know how many people they are sending their message to; distribution groups hide how many people are truly on the To line.

We introduced a feature in Exchange 2010 specifically to combat this (as a part of a broader feature called MailTips). In Outlook and OWA, it will warn you as you're composing your message of exactly how many people will get the message.

Blog post introducing the feature (with some really old screenshots):

http://blogs.technet.com/b/exchange/archive/2009/04/28/34073...

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.

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

When the blog post author (Larry Osterman) states that a quarter of 100,000 is 13,000, and that 10% of 13,000 is 130... I start to question if anything the author writes is in any way reflective of what actually occurred.

Anecdotally, many big companies, perhaps most, have stories like this.

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.

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.

I was on an fda list like this, and everytime someone messed it up 40+ people would reply-all with "I think you sent this to the wrong person".

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

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.

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).

Return-Path: <>

So it was a Blackberry...Storm

Haha That's a great story, thanks for sharing. I can only imagine him wondering what the hell happened in the office when he saw 10,000 unread messages on his phone! Haha

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)?

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.

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.

Yep, I work in a small, very distributed company. We use Hipchat and specifically have a tab that contains everyone in the company for that purpose. It's good to be able to occasionally just talk shit with folks you otherwise only meet once or twice a year.

Most colleges do. When I was in college, we has a similar incident. The Bursar sent out an email to all students, one student reply-all's, and a deluge of messages followed. I thought it was pretty funny. After a day or two, the sysadmin shut of the listserv and reminded everyone of usenet-esque newsgroup that had existed for years but no one used.

Networks like these popup and are cool because they're underground of sorts. That makes them appealing and interesting.

A couple guys at my college (Claremont McKenna) were somehow able to copy all of the student web addresses into an e-mail and proceeded to market their on-campus moving company, then later that list was abused to advertise parties and people angry about their name being included on these threads...

I agree, and I thought that was one of the use cases for Yammer or some other "Facebook for companies".

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.

I went to a similar school: one of my fondest memories from college is the raw, unfiltered discussion that took place on those mailing lists. And due to the mail client's ability to thread discussions I could ignore topics that were of no interest as well.

Which school?

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

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.

I used to work for a company that provided IT systems to about half the colleges in America. Your characterization is actually very shallow compared to the reality.

The reality is campuses are some of the most annoying places in the world to try to get IT stuff done. Each department is a fiefdom that thinks they are the most important people in the world. Each fiefdom expects the campus IT group to only care about them, and all technology decisions are made by committees consisting of those people. This is further exasperated by most professors and administrators having a massive fear of change and just wanting to teach like they've been teaching and research like they've been researching for 30 years. Imagine the English department having serious weigh-in on technology topics.

As far as the talent of the workers, in my experience you have a group that is worth every below-industry-standard penny they (don't) earn, who are hoping to not be noticed. But you also have many amazing, talented, extremely dedicated people who could be earning much, much more, but believe in the mission, so sacrifice pay to help support it.

they're just correctly setting your expectations for the IT performance of your future corporate overlords.

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

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

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.

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.

A really amusing writeup of a similar situation can be found on metafilter: http://www.metafilter.com/78177/PLEASE-UNSUBSCRIBE-ME-FROM-T...

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.

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

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!

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

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...

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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. :-)

go on....

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...

That was.... not a fun day.

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.

I don't think they exposed our emails. They just exposed a gateway to mass email us.

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.

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...

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.

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.

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.

Gmail "Mute" please

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...

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

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

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

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

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

That's Shit HN Says worthy.

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

"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...

In Korea, only old people use Slashdot references!

Ahh, my faith in HN comments is restored, thanks for the reference :)

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