E-Mail Snafu Sparks Spam Attack On Journalists 153
TFGeditor writes "According to an article at Editor & Publisher an e-mail mistake by the Casey Journalism Center at the University of Maryland wrongly invited hundreds of journalists nationwide to the university's prestigious 'Casey Medals' awards. The goof also launched a perpetual e-mail whirlwind as those who responded to the incorrect note unwittingly sent their feedback to everyone else on the recipient list. The e-mail was an electronic invitation to attend the organization's annual board meeting and awards lunch in Washington, D.C. on Aug, 8, according to Carrie Rowell, conference coordinator. She said it was meant only to reach the center's 11 board members, who are invited to the event where 18 journalists will be honored with the press-related awards. Rowell said she did not know how many people were affected, but did not dispute that it was likely hundreds."
Not sure this is news (Score:5, Insightful)
The illiterates in question were journalists, and the content of the email was bland but interesting to journalists. So the Editor and Publisher publication picked up on it...
I'm not sure how this qualifies as 'news for nerds'.
Re:Not sure this is news (Score:2, Funny)
How long until Slashdot starts linking to Page 6 celebrity gossip articles?
Re:Not sure this is news (Score:2)
Re:Not sure this is news (Score:2, Insightful)
And exactly what brilliant software solution would you develop that would prevent someone from sending a message to the wrong people? An email client's job is to send email to the people you tell it to. If you send it to all@mycompany.com - that's not the email client's fault. That's your own stupidity.
There's a REPLY button. There's a REPLY ALL button. That solves the 300 pointless replies that resulted.
There are very simple mail filters in almost every client. That solves the "I kept getting
Re:Not sure this is news (Score:2)
But since you have such interest, why not offer even a silly idea or fix instead of reducing every problem to stupidity on the users part. Circumstances are usually quite different in bugs like this. I personally think the situation was funny, and I merely thought it interesting to play the devil advocate. You, however, seem to be a bit hostile and quick with your reply. Hope you lose some of that some day.
Re:Not sure this is news (Score:1)
What you're suggesting is like stating "How can we fix sharp objects so that people won't stab themselves with them?".
Re:Not sure this is news (Score:4, Funny)
"Are you really sure?"
"Have you double checked?"
"Are you still sure?"
"Just a final check, you do want to send this don't you?"
And so on.
Re:Not sure this is news (Score:2)
yes
"Carefully saving this file..."
Re:Not sure this is news (Score:2)
why not, then, some simple energy into safe-guarding against comfusion by employing better design such as spatial distancing of similair options and possibly the use of shapes, colors, and shades to prevent accidental misrecognition? After all, humans in excited states make similiar mistakes. Do you want things to be a bit more immediately obvious or as hard as was originally designed to be when you're in a state of eme
Re:Not sure this is news (Score:2)
The idea behind this was to make it harder for people to lock their keys in their car. My girlfriend locked the keys in the car four times.
Of course, all the manufacturers did was train people to hold the handle up when they closed the door, whether the keys were inside the car or not.
Anything you add to m
Re:Not sure this is news (Score:2)
just my opinion, but i think the REPLY ALL button should be buried somewhere.
putting REPLY next to REPLY ALL is like putting DELETE next to FORMAT HARD DRIVE. Not the smartest decision IMHO.
I've noticed this in other programs and windows itself but I'm told it's not a flaw, it's a feature :D
Re:Not sure this is news (Score:1)
Probably not news - definitely not spam (Score:2)
Also, a bunch of technically illiterate people hit 'reply to all' instead of 'reply to'.
Yep, this is the crux of the matter. One might think that the denizens of
Re:Probably not news - definitely not spam (Score:2)
i.e. hitting a normal reply button would actually reply to everyone (a bit like a mailing list, really...)
Re:Probably not news - definitely not spam (Score:2)
Yeah, well, I thought it was funny that a bunch of intelligent (to hear them tell it) journalists engaged in an email cluster-f**k without realizing what was up.
Maybe I should have submitted as "Laugh, It's Funny."
Re:Probably not news - definitely not spam (Score:2)
Yeah, well, I thought it was funny that a bunch of intelligent (to hear them tell it) journalists engaged in an email cluster-f**k without realizing what was up.
True - that is pretty amusing. Perhaps my funny detector was on the fritz.
Silly anecdote: ~6 years ago I was the sole Sun server admin at a large scientific research facility. I got a call one day from a Ph.D (Physics) who was having trouble with his SPARC20 desktop machine. I had some free time and went along to help him. When I got ther
Re:Probably not news - definitely not spam (Score:2)
Re:Not sure this is news (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Not sure this is news (Score:2, Redundant)
Re:Not sure this is news (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Not sure this is news (Score:2)
After about 60 "reply to alls" sent to everyone, I did the math, and realized that that was 7.28 x 10^9 bytes of text, every character of which was spam.
Re:Not sure this is news (Score:2)
Re: Not sure this is news (Score:2)
And the 'Reply-To:' field. That's the kicker. (The one which got me into serious trouble...)
Re: Not sure this is news (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Not sure this is news (Score:1)
30 years out of date? (Score:2)
Maybe it's news about how dumb journalists are, but if you go into any newsagents and have a look at what they're writing you can see that for yourself anyway. For gods sake don't buy anything, it only encourages them.
Agreed (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Not sure this is news (Score:1)
As expected, everyone started replying to the sending email to say "remove me." The interesting part is that it turns out for convenience in sending, the mail admins had created the sending email address in such a way that any emails sent to the address automatica
Re:Not sure this is news (Score:1)
This seems to happen too often (Score:4, Insightful)
It's one thing if you read like an idiot in a personal message. It's far more damning when you do it en masse. Then again, maybe it's just far more accurate when you do it en masse.
Article text (Score:2, Informative)
By Joe Strupp
Published: July 20, 2005 7:00 AM ET
NEW YORK -- An e-mail mistake by the Casey Journalism Center at the University of Maryland wrongly invited hundreds of journalists nationwide to the university's prestigious "Casey Medals" awards. The goof also launched a perpetual e-mail whirlwind as those who responded to the incorrect note unwittingly sent their feedback to everyone else on the recipient list.
The back-and-forth sparked a cir
"Reply All"? (Score:1)
Rowell said she could not explain why so many responses, which were meant for her alone, would be sent to each person on the original message list.
That's not a "Reply All" problem, that's a system setup problem. I wouldn't blame this on the users.
But they're all friends so it's okay! (Score:5, Funny)
I mean, it might have been news (or at least interesting) if people were pissed. Then they "rekindled friendships" and all sung campfire songs, and I ceased to care.
In other news, I left my vacuum cleaner in the hallway and my brother stubbed his toe. He was going to be pissed, but decided not to be, so it was all good. He actually thought it was funny eventually. Just so you all know.
Re:Observations (Score:2)
but, yeah, I like where you're going...
Re:Observations (Score:1)
That's exactly what an obsessively cleanly Oedipussical skin-selling psychopath would say!
It's time to change your e-mail client (Score:3, Interesting)
Of course the best solution would be to stop and think about what you're about to do - nowadays shifting that mouse cursor slightly and clicking the wrong button can be hazardous. You'd think they could come up with some confirmation dialogue.
Re:It's time to change your e-mail client (Score:3, Funny)
Yea, yea. So you work at Microsoft. We don't want to hear about it anymore!
Re:It's time to change your e-mail client (Score:2)
That bug should be closed, then. (Score:2)
I can rearrange and remove toolbar buttons in Thunderbird just fine. You just right click on the toolbar, choose "Customize..." and you get a palatte. You can drag a button down to the palatte to remove it from the bar.
Re:That bug should be closed, then. (Score:2)
Re:That bug should be closed, then. (Score:2)
Just Kidding.
Seriously, though. Expect this bug to be around till the Seamonkey team gets going full steam now.
Re:That bug should be closed, then. (Score:2)
I was disappointed when the Mozilla suite was split up in a browser and a mailer, dropping the editor part on the floor.
I was more disappointed when they left the suite out in the cold and started fiddling with the name again.
But I did not believe my own eyes when they started to fiddle with version numbers, "skipping from 1.0 to 1.5 instead of 1.1 because it is a major upgrade".
Re:It's time to change your e-mail client (Score:2)
That's one of the more foolish ideas I've heard. I personally have the opposite problem where I work... people have a bad habit of using "reply one" instead of "reply all" and stripping everyone but the replyee out of the thread. And they wonder why there are communications issues in the company.
One of the reasons (aside from CYA protection) that I prefer to have anything related to tasks go through our Cerberus Helpdesk [cerberusweb.com] installation: it munges the Reply-To header (n
Re:It's time to change your e-mail client (Score:2)
What we have seen many times in the company is people sending to large groups or even everyone in the company, asking for reply (e.g. "who is going to join at this week's drink"). Then, a certain group of users, and often the same every time, is going to hit "reply all" to send their confirmation. This
Re:It's time to change your e-mail client (Score:2)
Re:It's time to change your e-mail client (Score:1)
Note will go out to some notes group/list with at least a couple dolts who really shouldn't be on the list, but reply-to-all asking to be removed. Pretty soon, the other dolts come out of the woodwork and also reply to the entire list asking to be removed. Then people on the list start complaining that they don't want to get all these messages, please take me off too.
This will go on for quite a while, with
Re:It's time to change your e-mail client (Score:2)
Or you could just move the button to a different location...
Re:It's time to change your e-mail client (Score:1)
Re:It's time to change your e-mail client (Score:2)
Outlook allows you to do this also.
I'm growing tired for this crap. "Spam" .. bah! (Score:5, Insightful)
An email was sent to more people than intended. That is not SPAM.
The reply-address was an email list. That is not SPAM.
A lot of unwitting journalist morons continued to reply the list, generating more emails. It's not spam - it's stupidity on the part of the journalists.
It's not spam! Of course it was an error to send out the email to a lot of people - but it's the same fucking receipients that generated the flurry of unwanted emails... and for each fucking 'get me of this list' - everyone got more crap into their inboxes.
I'll say most of the blame is on the journalists that coulnd't keep their fingers of the 'reply' buttons.
Me too! (Score:2)
This is news? (Score:2, Insightful)
Can't wait for the dupes to show up in a few days.
Breaking News! (Score:3, Funny)
Coming up after the break: pornography breaches the Internet, a heated debate breaks out in comp.os.vms, and somebody's grandmother installs "the America Inline" from a floppy disk.
Re:Breaking News! (Score:1)
Re:Breaking News! (Score:2)
Spam? (Score:3, Insightful)
Of course -- with their address now added to a couple of hundred recipients computers
In the context it happened though -- that certainly wasn't spam. Not even close.
Re:Spam? (Score:1)
Spam [catb.org] from the Jargon File.
Re:Spam? (Score:1)
Re:Spam? (Score:1)
Re:Spam? (Score:1)
And theyre basically wrong.
So really, its:
- a non-story
- not SPAM in the FUD sense hat journalists refer to it as
- a fantastic thing sor nerds like us to feel smug about
- a more fantastic thing for nerds like us to get all semantic about
- another NOT front page worthy
- a total waste of time, but hey - its Su
Feature of Microsoft POP3 connector (Score:5, Informative)
When the original sender is stupid enough to include all addresses a mail is sent to in the To: header, and two or more readers of mail have their mailbox at an ISP and copy it to their Exchange server using the abovementioned Microsoft POP3 connector, mail can really start bouncing around.
Why? Because of a bug in the Microsoft POP3 connector, mail that it retrieves from a POP3 box is sent to all addresses in the To: line. So the mailserver of every user of this crap will re-send a copy of the mail to all recepients, even those outside his or her own domain.
When two or more users receive the message, they start sending more and more copies around.
A while ago we received the same message from someone several thousand times. It took me a while to figure out what was really happening (we are not using those MS products ourselves), and the only way to kill it off was to reject all mail from the original sender.
It seems that KB835734 offers a fix for this fatal bug, but MS does not consider it critical so I presume most admins have not applied it. Those SBS systems are a ticking bomb in the e-mail system.
Re:Feature of Microsoft POP3 connector (Score:2)
Given fast enough connections, and if not caught quickly e
Re:Feature of Microsoft POP3 connector (Score:2)
It is not as bad as you think at first time, because in the loop there is a "look in POP box" action which occurs at an (apparently configurable) interval. When it would be direct SMTP looping it would melt down pretty quickly.
However, there were about 4 of those broken SBS 2003 servers on the list that received the messages, so the behaviour was still pretty b
Re:Feature of Microsoft POP3 connector (Score:2)
Last time I ran into this (a couple of weeks back), by the time someone mentioned the problem with our mailserver (which was hosting the vanity domain in one of the addresses in the To: line that forwarded to an offsite pop box, from which the Microsoft product downloaded it) -- o
Re:Feature of Microsoft POP3 connector (Score:2)
At first I thought it was an unlikely coincidence that hit us. Googling for thinks like "mai
Re:Feature of Microsoft POP3 connector (Score:1)
Re:Feature of Microsoft POP3 connector (Score:2)
This, in general, is not very wise.
Welcome to the club! (Score:1)
A hosting customer sent a press release to major dutch media, of course with everybody, role accounts, some personal addresses, in the To. Then the mailserver of some publishing company started looping on the message, resending it thousands of times to all recipients. It took the administrator of the borked server DAYS to resolve this!
Meanwhile, recipients' mailboxes were overflowing, bounces clogged our virus scanner, and press people were constantly calling
Re:Welcome to the club! (Score:2, Interesting)
Wouldn't that be grounds for a suit against the operator of that broken Exchange gateway? (forgery, damage to reputation)
Hmm, but look at the bright side: this appears to be a great pranking tool: just locate two or three of such SBS 2003 servers, forge a message to users on each of the three, plus your list of marks, send it on its merry way, sit back, and watch the phun!
Re:Feature of Microsoft POP3 connector (Score:2)
So, rejecting on the MAIL FROM:, at least temporarily until the loop has died, is
The "so what?" factor (Score:2, Insightful)
I have a suggestion for the moderators of slashdot. There's something called the "so what?" factor, and if you can't answer that question about an article, then don't post it.
Canadian Articling (Score:1, Insightful)
Not only did this reveal the names and email addresses of all the applicants, it was followed up by two "Recall" emails, similarly addressed.
Retards abound. The power to really do stupid things has become all too easy and accessible. That or the average intelligence has kicked the bucket, so to speak.
Re:Canadian Articling (Score:1)
As a former IT manager turned journalist... (Score:2)
I think this is an amazingly funny story. It's a standing joke in the newspaper business that all journalists tend to be a little inept when it comes to anything technical, like adding two numbers together for example, so I'm not at all surprised to see that this happened. However, I am pleased to note that many of my colleagues turned an adverse situation into an opportunity to reconnect with long lost friends and coworkers. That's journalism for you -- it's all about the gab.
Reminds me of this story (Score:1)
Funny... (Score:2)
You keep using the word SPAM (Score:2)
Sidetracked. (Score:2)
I mean, on the one hand I could usher the world into the Star Trek era, where energy and material goods are abundant and world peace miraculously ensues, but on the other, these absolutely imperative diversions present themselves. I mean - wow! - someone accidentally sent email to too many people and other
Yup... (Score:2)
This is Front Page News? (Score:2)
-
Why the hell was this approved? (Score:2)
Re:Why the hell was this approved? (Score:2)
In other news, someone clicked 'approve article' when they should've hit 'reject'.
stupidity (Score:3, Insightful)
As a rule of thumb, never set the return address for a mailing list or a group mailing to the group.
As a rule of thumb, never put more than a handful of people in the To/Cc lines of an Email.
Stick to those two rules, and you'll be doing OK. Break them only if you have a really, really good reason.
Who fricking cares (Score:2)
Accidental article (Score:3, Funny)
Feeling proud, virus writers? (Score:2)
-- The price of eternal vigilance is a dollar a day and half an hour of your time.
Carefully choose a responsible newspaper. Support it, read it, write to it.
Do your part.
Snafu (Score:2)
What is far more interesting is the history of the word Snafu [wikipedia.org] and it's related kin.
Amazing! (Score:2)
Simply fascinating!
At least, it would have been fascinating 30 years ago.
Is it too late to put ZONK on that list? (Score:2)
Interesting thing revealed, earthquakes / airports (Score:3, Interesting)
When you are in an airport, elevator or dentist's office and stuck in some frustrating situation with a stranger, often you will strike up a conversation with them commenting about the idiocy, commisserating, and so on. The above mail loop sounds like it was novel enough and big enough for the participants that they felt like they were in such a situation and "made the most of it".
Two days ago I was stuck by a train station due to an earthquake in Tokyo that caused all trains to be delayed by two hours. For some reason that comaraderie did not come to pass, possibly because people could easily leave the station (in my case small groups hung out at a nearby cafe and talked among themselves).
When you get email being sent to a lot of people from someone, and you can see the other people's names, still you don't generally start side conversations with them. Part is that you probably don't know them well enough; the journalists in this case did in some cases at least. But also, in group emails I think people tend to jump right down to the body of the message and while perhaps some people read the To: and CC: lines with interest, it is not a feeling that there are a lot of people with you reading the message concurrently. The journalists were all reading it within an hour or two on a given morning.
This makes me wonder if more of a chat-like element could be introduced into email. If you could see a photo or video of the other recipients, and maybe open a chat with some if you could see they were online at the same time, would that not increase the potential for communication among members of a group mailing? Certainly you can easily email people directly whom you have see on an ordinary mailing list, but I think a decision is made that you are "on a mailing list" and then if you have something you don't want the whole list to get, "whether you should send a private message" to someone you don't know. So I only reply privately to the list owner and people who reply to me, usually, and conversely don't put thank yous on the main list.
It may sound unintuitive to computer geeks but if you consider the convivial atmosphere of these convivial journalists mostly happily distracted one morning by an explosion of mail from tons of somewhat related people, I think it suggests the possibility of a different mode of network communication that even if only text based, could mix positive elements of video conferencing, IRC and threaded discussion sites, possibly as an add-on to a mail client.
Re:Interesting thing revealed, earthquakes / airpo (Score:2)
Thanks,
Matt
Now I know what they mean... (Score:2)
Wrong word usage (Score:2)
That should be:
"as those who responded to the incorrect note witlessly sent their feedback to everyone else on the recipient list."
Etymologically they're the same thing. Somehow "unwittingly" has somehow come to mean "unintentionally" rather than "done without wit" where "wit" means "intellectual ability". The more literal meaning of the word, which is retained in "witlessly", is far m
no humans need be involved (Score:2)
A few months ago I received the worst flood of email that I have ever received due to the unfortunate interaction of two computers. The sysadmin on the machine on which I actually read my mail made an error in updating the mail system (failed to install some PERL module, I think it was) that resulted in the mailer sending out bounce messages although in fact the mail was delivered. A number of these messages were in response to mail forwarded from my account at another institution. Unfortunately, that mach
That's nothing (Score:2)
Mark Cuban (Score:2)
He sent out a mass email to 7,000 of his closest friends saying "please vote my player as an NBA All-Star". He put all of the names in the "TO" rather than the "BCC" box.
Instantly, all 7000 people had each others' email addresses. Many of them did a "reply-to-all" to chat about what a mistake that was, while others used the list to buy/sell tickets and basketball merchandise to each other.
Eventually, Mark sent out
Me Too! (Score:2, Funny)
Re:But what about it? (Score:1, Troll)
Re:Rowell is computer illiterate (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:information technology? (Score:1, Troll)
People fuck up with emails, text, etc. all the time. Seriously, WHO FUCKING CARES (apart the people who are about to mod me troll)?