Mailing list blues
I’m on a mailing list at Don’t Amend, a group dedicated to stopping the hijacking of the Constitution by the idiots against same-sex marriage. It’s a fine cause, and all I had to do was sign a petition, not the hardest thing in the world. But the poor folks at Don’t Amend found themselves the target of a malcontent, who hacked into their mail server and opened their bulk email list to anyone. I’m not sure if this caused me, and others on the list, to get more spam, because I get over to two hundred spam emails each day, so another dozen or so in my junk mailbox would go unnoticed by me. What it did noiticably do was spawn one of the most hilarious and goofy responses from several dozen of the users on the list. If I were going to make my own bulk email list of suckers and newbies, today would have made my work far, far easier.
Instead, I just deleted the emails. But not before I read through a quarter of them to get this jist of the responses to a mailing list gone amuck. The innocent response was, “Remove me from your list,” one of which started the whole mess. The first sender of the remove-me email was doing the right thing. S/he clicked a link that opened up a new blank email with the remove-me subject line, and sent it, just like s/he was supposed to do. But, like an avalanche or a mudslide, it only takes one pebble to start the whole thing rolling, and soon there were three needless angry and terse emails telling this first innocent, and everyone else on the list, that they didn’t set up the list, and don’t tell them to take you off the list that they have nothing to do with, and what the hell is a list anyway, and, by the way, go to hell!
Why so tense? These could have been chalked up to before-the-first-caffine-intake email, since they took place so early in the morning, but these same nasty, clueless emails kept coming in. The first one started at 8 a.m. EDT and the last trickled down at noon, when Don’t Amend finally fixed the hole. A few people took it upon themselves to send the nasty, curt response several times throughout the day, along with requests to take themselves off the list. That’s good thinking.
Still, I understand the impulse to try to control things that are out of one’s hands. But spitting against the wind? Not my style. Apparently, though, there are a large portion of the Don’t Amend mailing list that believe themselves to be of a higher authority, because these people “helped” by telling everyone else to stop sending emails to the list, over and over again. I do believe they failed to realize that the greater majority of us on the Don’t Amend mailing list were not, in fact, sending emails to the list, so more than half of the email pollution was coming from these know-it-alls who were telling us to stop replying to all, as they, themselves, were replying to all.
In order to make their point as annoying as possible, they spread as much ALL CAPS and weird typefaces in their emails. This is something that only friends should do to each other in emails, but never, ever to strangers.
A couple of my favorite responses were the one that basically said, “I don’t get that many emails, so this was a lot of fun to read through. Relax and enjoy it people,” which I did, and the other, verbatim, “I have been receiving mass emails from member of Dont Amend with weird "remove me" dialogue....please dont remove me.” Sweetly insecure.
And, yes, YES, all I wanted to do was respond to each of these people and tell them that they were being so stupid. And I wouldn’t have sent the email to the list, either, because I know how to use email, unlike the woman who insisted she has used email a long time and knew how to reply to an individual, as she emailed everyone on the goddammed list! I would have wasted a large amount of time to teach these people a valuable lesson by copying and pasting my rant into several dozen emails. But, but, I thought, that would be pointless. No one learns lessons via email. And, besides, I have a blog! I’ll post it there! Yeah, that’ll learn ’em.
Posted by Jonathan at 08:11 PM, 30 April 2004
