DonHopkins on Nov 14, 2016 | parent | context | favorite | on: The NHS's 1.2M employees are trapped in a 'reply-a...
Back in the days of ARPANET mailing lists, there used to be an "educational" mailing list called "please-remove-me", that was for people who asked an entire mailing list to remove them, instead of removing themselves, or sending email to the administrative "-request" address.
So when somebody asked an entire mailing list to remove them, somebody else would add them to the "please-remove-me" mailing list, and they would start getting hundreds of "please remove me" requests from other people, so they could discuss the topic of being removed from mailing lists with people with similar interests, without bothering people on mailing lists whose topics weren't about being removed from mailing lists.
It worked so well that it was a victim of its own success: Eventually the "please-remove-me" mailing list was so popular that it got too big and had to be shut down...
...Then there was Jordan Hubbard's infamous "rwall incident" in 1987:
In more modern times, within the last couple months, there was the Epic/Unreal Engine Github Email Storm[0][1] at minium 60m emails, because a few hundred thousand people were getting over a hundred emails within a minute or so thanks to a user trying to get a minor patch pulled in so they could get some credit/resume line/who knows. They "@"tted the whole membership of the organization. There was a few repeats of the occurrence immediately afterwards as well by some trolls.
A fun aside is the article on wikipedia [1] begins with Jordan Hubbard and ends with Epic:
The person who @'d the Epic org owns very little of the blame, in my opinion. If you have a button that causes 60m+ emails to be sent, and you leave it in a public place with no warnings and no confirmation dialogs, that's your bad choice. The person who presses the button is incidental; someone was going to.
They are not to blame for the email storm they caused. But they are still to blame for aggressively @-ing those developer groups not once but twice in a row for an insignificant PR. That's bad form, no matter if it causes an email storm or not.
Something similar happened (multiple times?) when I worked at AWS when someone decided to send a mass email to literally the entire company and people inevitably reply-all enough to clog the system and bring it to its knees. Many confused people were replying "UNSUBSCRIBE" (again, to the whole company) as if it would take them off
This happened to the entire US federal government in 2014. Someone reply-all'd a mailing from the General Fund Enterprise Business System notification asking to be taken off the list, and it escalated as then thousands of people who didn't realize they were on this list did the same thing, then got worse when smart asses reply-all'd telling other people not to reply-all.
Part of the problem is from admins creating lists and putting users on them without user knowing anything about it. Can you blame users for being confused and seeking to get off a list in the only way they know how? IT Admins bare blame in these incidents. The users just make it fun for everyone but IT, but IT hopefully sees the fun later when they aren't running around putting out the fire
May I amend this to say "IT policies" are to blame?
Thinking back to my own days in the IT Department, I would have LOVED to say "No" to the requests to make yet another distribution list for a Senior Manager or Director, full of everyone and their assistants for the very same reason as you (plus a few other reasons), but that was just one of the many things I had a lot of power to execute but next to no power to actually influence-at least if I had any expectation of keeping my job and not getting chewed out for balking at such requests.
Memory goes back to the two worst IT Admin positions I held, both were in high volume calling environments, both involved people constantly moving between teams, managers renaming teams, trading personnel, moving people between groups, hot desking--all of which involved the constant creation and distruction of distribution groups, ring groups, hunt groups etcetera in ADUC, hot phones, not to mention the nesting of groups within groups within groups, and no amount of "showing my work" to the Director or IT Management to show how nothing was getting done except beating our Exchange Server into a bloody mess got any movement from anyone in leadership
Then you get a group of people panicked about the panic who start replying all saying please stop replying all to this email, and then people replying to them to point out how they are just making the problem worse...
I LOVE reply-all email storms. Used to happen a lot more in the 90's and 00's. I was on one in an investment bank and in the end the Chief of Staff for the division replied-all with "The next person to reply-all to this email chain will be sacked."
I work at a large healthcare company and we also lost email for an afternoon because of this. The funniest thing is that you get responses like: “All, I know I’m replying to all as well, but let me be the last and let’s just stop it.” … Not realizing that all those similar emails have been send in the hours before and are just now finding their way through the clogged system. It’s like a DOS attack driven by Human amplification.
Once upon a time that was the accepted albeit snarky way to inform senders they were misusing the to field and that the recipient was not interested in the message
I would definitely still use it for that, albeit wouldn't use it within a reply all.
when you are oncall and people who are not oncall keep replying to the oncall email in response to the not-incident making pager duty go off like a frog in a sock ..stop it.. I say.. but not reply-all.. 'cause then you footgun again
Once I got on some internal distribution list of a client. I was not needing those emails, plus they were all in Hungarian I do not understand a word. I tried multiple times to contact the sender and asked to remove me to no avail.
The ultimate thing that helped immediately: reply-all to hundred recipients. (Also got my account blocked from sending emails for a while. Fun)
> ...Then there was Jordan Hubbard's infamous "rwall incident" in 1987
Not as large, but reminds me of a new freshman when I was a senior in college back in 1993 that got the great idea to "cd /home; mail *" on the main undergrad machine. Complaints to us admins were flooding in for days.
> Back in the days of ARPANET mailing lists, there used to be an "educational" mailing list called "please-remove-me", that was for people who asked an entire mailing list to remove them, instead of removing themselves, or sending email to the administrative "-request" address.
If someone sends an email with most of the words just being "unsubscribe" or "remove me" then at the least you don't send it on. Added points for auto-replying unsubscribe instructions or even just do it.
DonHopkins on Nov 14, 2016 | parent | context | favorite | on: The NHS's 1.2M employees are trapped in a 'reply-a...
Back in the days of ARPANET mailing lists, there used to be an "educational" mailing list called "please-remove-me", that was for people who asked an entire mailing list to remove them, instead of removing themselves, or sending email to the administrative "-request" address.
So when somebody asked an entire mailing list to remove them, somebody else would add them to the "please-remove-me" mailing list, and they would start getting hundreds of "please remove me" requests from other people, so they could discuss the topic of being removed from mailing lists with people with similar interests, without bothering people on mailing lists whose topics weren't about being removed from mailing lists.
It worked so well that it was a victim of its own success: Eventually the "please-remove-me" mailing list was so popular that it got too big and had to be shut down...
...Then there was Jordan Hubbard's infamous "rwall incident" in 1987:
http://everything2.com/title/Jordan+K.+Hubbard