Email Bedlam

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I love meeting new people, and email is a fine way to do it.  When a friend sent out a change of address notification to his address book the other day, he accidently put the entire list on the CC line instead of the BCC line, allowing anyone who replied all to mail to the whole list again.  Some of us regarded this as a golden opportunity.  Others got bent out of shape, and began mailing the whole list asking to be removed from all future replies.  Ultimately a futile exercise, I’m afraid, as each replier hit the send button before the request arrived in their inbox.  It was quite fun as a whimsical conversation about our collective opportunities to be offered a bebo-like ransom for our companies ensued.

No harm done, except that a few self-absorbed individuals had a few extra pieces of email in their inboxes.  Chill, dudes and dudettes!

Now, it could have been worse.  During the late 1990′s at Microsoft there was a famous incident where a mailing list called BEDLAM DL3 was used in a similar way.  BEDLAM DL3 was an experimental list being used by either IS, or the Exchange team themselves.  It had over 25,000 names of Microsoft employees on it.  When one employee discovered the list, and wondered why she had been included on it, she mailed the list asking to be removed — a common error.  That set of a storm of Reply All’s saying “Me too”, followed by another storm of Reply All’s saying “Stop using Reply-All, it bogs down the email system, and so on…

In a matter of an hour, 15.5 million messages, representing 195 Gigabytes of bandwidth, passed across the network, bringing the entire email system to its knees.  Following that, the Exchange team implemented limits on the size of the reply all list.  Oh, and of course, t-shirts were made.

Hmmm… perhaps it’s time for a trip to Café Press, and get some t-shirts made…

Feel free to email or call me anytime. 

Alec Saunders is the Vice President of Developer Relations for BlackBerry make Research in Motion. This is his personal blog, with his personal viewpoints. Prior to this Alec was the CEO and co-founder of Calliflower — the easiest way to hold a meeting, online, on a conference call, or on the go. A double-decade veteran of product management and marketing, he spent nine years at Microsoft where he helped launch Windows 95, the first two versions of Internet Explorer, the Universal Plug and Play initiative, the push into home markets, opt-in email marketing and what might well go down in history as the very first direct email list ever.

Tagged as: email, Etiquette