We made a mistake

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.

> 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.

Mistakes happen.