Comment by danbruc

My favorite version of this tale: "Free Bananas in the Kitchen!"

http://www.metafilter.com/78177/PLEASE-UNSUBSCRIBE-ME-FROM-T...

I remember it happened at NYU a couple of years ago and they turned it into a kind of ad-hoc social network/partyline. I wonder if anyone archived those emails? I suppose they deserve to remain "private."

One listserve (can't remember which) made up a list for people who complained like this instead of following the unsubscribe instructions. The admins would remove complainers from the normal lists and add them all to one mailing list, where the only emails they got were each others' demands to be taken off the mailing list, with unsubscribe instructions added to the beginning and the end of every single email.

Ha. There is no explanation of why the mailing lists were named "Bedlam" though, and I doubt non-native readers know what it refers to. To quote Wikipedia [0]:

"Bedlam may refer to:

Bethlem Royal Hospital, London hospital first to specialise in the mentally ill and origin of the word "bedlam" describing chaos or madness"

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bedlam

I also found that to be evidence of pretty horrific architecture in Exchange. Two actual recipient lists with a secret internal one? Bloating headers to 13K? At the very least, it seems to me like they chose to put the distribution logic at the wrong layer...

Thanks for the link. I was surprised that it was written by Larry Osterman. I enjoy listening to his stories about Microsoft. Have you seen his Channel 9 videos [0]? I really enjoy the checking in videos with Erik Meijer.

[0] http://channel9.msdn.com/tags/Larry+Osterman

Literally the exact same thing happened at Case Western this past weekend

Ah yes, the age old "reply-all" email storm.

The bit about the recipient processing bug is novel tough, ouch.