[williamscales]

Relevant Wikipedia page, since the article is completely lacking in historical context: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Email_storm

"On 14 October 1997, a Microsoft employee noticed that they were on an as-yet unknown email distribution list 'Bedlam DL3', and emailed the list asking to be removed. This list contained approximately a quarter of the company's employees, 13,000 email addresses. Other users replied to the list with similar requests and still others responded with pleas to stop replying to the list. A Microsoft employee estimates that 15 million emails were sent, using 195 GB of traffic."

[tobias3]

And because they were dogfooding Exchange server they ended up fixing several bugs: https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/exchange/2004/04/08/me-t...

A net plus for Microsoft, I would say.

[dorianm]

> To prevent anything like this happening in the future, we added a message recipient limit to Exchange – the server now has the ability to enforce a site-wide limit on the number of recipients in a single email message, which neatly prevents this from being a problem in the future.

Seems like they added a limit instead of fixing the actual problem.

[dghughes]

The bananas in the break room incident and most recently Reuters.

edit: Atos that's a new one. But no bananas? I'm disappointed.

The "free bananas in the kitchen" story. http://www.metafilter.com/78177/PLEASE-UNSUBSCRIBE-ME-FROM-T...

[kchoudhu]

This happened a few times at the bank I worked at for almost a decade.

You could count on the technologists to not throw gas on the fire by replying (everyone'd heard of Bedlam DL3), but once non-technical sales, trading and ops were on the list, all bets were off.

[losteric]

Well, aside from the trolling devs. At my company there've been a couple incidents of this where someone jumps on the thread with advice like "Unsubscribe has to be in the title" or "You have to BCC the list!". When that happens... oh dear god.

[sotojuan]

One time someone figured out you could send an email to everyone in the university network with one command as everyone was in a Gmail group. That person started an email chain that lasted a few months.

[thatswrong0]

When I got accepted to one university's CS program, they emailed congratulations to everyone who was accepted... on cc rather than bcc. I couldn't help but immediately take advantage of the situation, and the ensuing storm resulted in the admissions officer getting exceedingly angry and threatening revoking admission upon further misconduct. Fun times.

[tener]

Last week we had mailstorm with ~11k people. A significant fraction of the company.

[hprotagonist]

Me, too!

[serge2k]

Anyone who has worked for Amazon has heard tales of "UNSUBSCRIBE"