by Sean D'Souza
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Have you had an email fiasco where everything went totally bananas? Things you never meant to happen, happened. And you felt like hiding in some deep, dark cave, where no one could find you.
"Anything that can go wrong will go wrong." So said a guy by the name of Murphy. And I believe him, because if anyone has had a super email disaster, I have. Keep reading, because if this ever happens to you, you'll know what to do.
How Would You Like to Get 35 Emails from One Person?
One morning on a rather forgettable day, about three years ago, I managed to send out over 7,000 emails in less than an hour. In effect, I accidentally sent out 35 emails to each of the 200 people on a particular list.
Back then, I was new to email. I didn't have any software and no budget to send out email through an email-based company. So we wrote a little do-it-yourself program that sent out an email to each individual address, without revealing the whole 'cc' list.
We were so proud of programming prowess! All the names of the recipients were on that list, and the server picked them up one by one, sending the email to each individual.
Which Was Fine in Theory...
None of the recipients could see the other people on the list. They didn't know that it had gone to 199 other people.
But we hadn't thought through the complete process. One unforeseen bug dialed Murphy's number. When a recipient hit reply, our little program sent their message to everyone else on the list!
All it Took Was One Person to Hit the Reply Button
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