I have a lot of email addresses. Plenty of accounts that I have accumulated over the years, by signing up to this or that service. For convenience reasons nowadays I actually forward practically all of them to my main gmail account (Yes, I am a bit of a Google fan-girl). This has various advantages - like for starters not having to remember a plethora of logins and passwords, however from time to time it can cause a major havoc.

And this is exactly what happened the other day. One of my Polish accounts suffered from configuration issues, which meant that a supposedly one way mailing list email, allowed any person to send a message to that address and it would have been delivered to quite a hefty amount of recipients.

What made it even worse was that it was not an active mailing group. It has been used for some survey purposes ages ago, and thus most users didn’t even know (myself included) that such a list existed. Once the information leaked out you can clearly imagine what had happened. In short spam was arriving long after the issue has actually been fixed…

But this is just a little background information. What I found fascinating is how the whole matter developed over time.

It all started with a single message asking if it is true, that if you send an email to ankieta@gazeta.pl it gets sent to all of its subscribers. Personally I thought it was just a single  random spam, and I ignored it. Especially as for a while there was no response.

After some time several more messages popped-up, like shy little monsters poking their heads out of a hole. Most of these were simply “test” or “it’s really true!” emails.

Later the momentum quickly grew and the messages got less curious, and more offensive. Making fun of the admin or sending nasty messages about other mailing list users. Also this prompted more requests for someone investigating the issue, being removed from the list or just saying “hello, have a good day”.

Next finally came the messages with links. I was genuinely surprised how long it took for those to appear. At first the initial process was repeated. A few personal websites, some even with an apologetic note like “sorry for the spam, but this is just a too good occasion to be missed”. And I must say I even checked out some of the first links, and as such I can say they were not offensive or scamy.

Unfortunately this did not last long. And once the links started pouring through they quickly escalated to full blown spam, shop advertisments, etc. Often no message at all, just a link slapped in an email.

This in turn provoked a bigger number of pleads to the admins for fixing the issue or to remove the poor soul from the list, threats against the company breaking privacy laws and surprisingly quite a few humorous responses.

Amazingly some people just ignored all the junk and sent greetings to other anonymous users, or even personal ads. Which really does show that even faced with a disaster (yes, my finger still hurts from sieving through all those run-away messages and clicking delete…) people can still take life quite lightly and smile.