The Unsubscribe Virus 

As my home inbox gets a few more spam emails every day... I'm reminded of a hilarious incident that occurred at a previous employer of mine a few years ago. My first full time job after college was with Rockwell Automation. They have offices literally around the world, and have several internal mailing lists that they used to send useless corporate crap to. At the time, they had one huge umbrella email list that went to every employee at every office. It never got used... until one day they sent out an email on it.

I don't remember the subject of the email any more... it hardly matters. All I remember is the reply back from some brilliant guy in a European office. You see, he had replied to the email not realizing that doing so actually sent his reply to the entire mailing list. It said simply "Please unsubscribe me". And then it began. It didn't take long at all for others to see his reply and think that they too could get off this list. And so they replied in the same way, not knowing that this was not a list you could unsubscribe from. After all... who wouldn't want to get corporate communications?

Within minutes everyone's mailbox was filled with hundreds of mails from people trying to unsubscribe. Then came the emails from people trying to tell them that they couldn't, and that they were only filling everyone's inbox... as if that could stop them. For an entire day it was as if we had been hit with an Outlook virus... which was ironic since we didn't even use Outlook (we used Lotus Notes).

Finally the brilliant people in the IT department closed down the list so that nobody could send to it. I swear it took them at least a full day to do this. Then they sent out another email to everyone explaining how the list worked, and that they would only send out "really important information very sparingly" on it. But then they made the mistake of opening the list back up.

You see... during this whole fiasco, someone else in one of the European offices was on vacation. A few days later when he got back, he saw all these unsubscribe emails, and thought he could too. And then it started all over again.

IT was much quicker on the ball that time around. Finally they locked down the list so only a few select people could send to it, and it didn't happen again. But to this day I remember the "Unsubscribe Virus" that was caused by stupid people, not stupid computers.