Agent forgot to BCC everyone

[Sysman]

Saw it happen about a decade ago. A bank cashier was trying to flog some unwanted tickets for a musical, but instead of picking the distribution list for the branch, picked the distribution list for about 50,000 folks.

Then someone repled to "All", some else replied to that, and so it went on.

Once the dust had settled, senior management sent out a humorous email describing the events, ending it with:

P.S. The tickets have been sold.

[Sockpuppet]

The same happened at a place i was a pemie. A lady sent an e-mail to around 8000 employees saying that you shouldn't use a cash machine if its been tampered with then preceded to attach pictures of what a cash machine looked like.

It was a 10Mb email. This was in 2004 and it was a lotus notes e-mail system.

[AtW]

I blame programmers - just how hard was it to show special warning requiring confirmation when CC field contains more than 10 emails? And where did testers look??!!?

[minestrone]

Seen it happen to about 10,000 people in a multinational bank.

It would stop for a while, someone would come into the office in another time zone, see the mails, not read the last 100 of 'please stop replying' then fire of a reply of 'please remove me from this group' and it would start again.

I wanted to to reply "I am spartacus" but would have probably been marched out the office.

[Support Monkey]

I worked for a company and somone sent an email to every group and person on the whole global address list, it simply said "TEST",

Then someone replied to every group and every person on the whole global address list and it simply said "ICALS"

then many people started to reply to everyone and every group on the whole global address list saying "please stop replying to this email"

in the end the IT director had to email everyone and ever group on the global address list advising "the next person who replys will be sacked"

i beleive in total it went to around 8000 people including some very senior TV officials, the resulting fallout was felt for many months to come and created a lot of work for their Exchange administrators


the origional email came from a temp account and the sender was never traced

[suityou01]

Is anyone else on the email going round at the moment where an agent from Elan accidentally CC'ed instead of BCC'ed? As usual everyone is 'replying to all' asking everyone to stop replying to all. I've filtered it into a junk folder in Gmail but it looks like it could go on for a while as there's over 700 people on the email. They're talking about adding each other in LinkedIn and meeting up in the pub

Yep this happened to me years ago. The ensuing 4 or 5 emails bollocking the agent were quite rude. Being a bedwetter I replied to all saying that the agent must feel terrible, we have all made mistakes and in the scheme of things this was really not a big deal so could everyone just drop it.

I got a personal reply from the agent saying thanks.

Bedwetter I am.

[Sysman]

I came across this with someone new at an agency. I sent them an email explaining why it was wrong and how to BCC instead. I CC'd their boss, and it didn't happen again.

The cat was out of the bag however, and a year or so later we were treated to a succession of increasingly desperate pleas from someone not being renewed and looking for a new gig.

[Clippy]

No but I have had this happen before from other agents.

I've had my accountant do this in the past too - when advising clients of holiday dates.

[Bunk]

Is anyone else on the email going round at the moment where an agent from Elan accidentally CC'ed instead of BCC'ed? As usual everyone is 'replying to all' asking everyone to stop replying to all. I've filtered it into a junk folder in Gmail but it looks like it could go on for a while as there's over 700 people on the email. They're talking about adding each other in LinkedIn and meeting up in the pub