How to send 50,000 emails in 30 seconds
Yesterday at work somebody sent an email to the Help Desk (or to give them their proper name, the IT Service Desk) asking for some help building a macro in Word. The email was forwarded on to our team as, in addition to training, we develop custom solutions (actually that’s my area of expertise so I ended up with said email).
The Service Desk Agent (to give them their official title) replied to the enquirer and also CC’d in our team (we have a mailbox, the name of which is the name of the team)…except they didn’t – they actually CC’d in a Global Distribution List. This Distribution List, which has over 1000 people on it (including the people on our team), belongs to our team. We use it to send out newsletters and special offers. The name of the Distribution List is very similar to the name of our team mailbox, so an easy mistake to make.
So out went 1000 emails. Most of the recipients realising that they had received an email in error, just deleted the email, however, about 50 people, horrified that this meant that they were one more email away from Inbox Zero (or more likely they were one more email nearer the dreaded Inbox Full message) decided to reply “why have I received this email…it’s got nothing to do with me”
The problem was that instead of hitting Reply, they hit Reply to All, which sent their email back to the Service Desk AND the Distribution List. This then caused other people to reply, politely (and some not so politely) asking people to stop replying. They too hit Reply to All
And so, in 30 seconds , 50,000 emails were circulated around the company.