The Group Dynamics of Mass Unsolicited E-Mail Lists:
Every once in a while, some random person sends out an unsolicited e-mail to an assembled distribution list of anywhere from 50 to 200 addresses found on the web trying to either settle some personal score or bring attention to a cause.
In my experience as an occassional recipient of such e-mails — whether because of blogging or the day job, or some other random connection — the dynamic usually goes something like this:
UPDATE: I switched (1) and (2) around, as I remembered that people usually don't start asking to be removed from the list until a handful of e-mails from the list are in their inbox.
In my experience as an occassional recipient of such e-mails — whether because of blogging or the day job, or some other random connection — the dynamic usually goes something like this:
1. A few people will respond with a "reply all" suggesting to the sender that it's really not nice to spam so many people like that, and/or that the message of the e-mail is wrong or offensive.It's the folks who participate in Step 3 without a hint of irony that I find the most amusing. But then the whole thing is sort of funny, I guess.
2. One or two people will respond with a "reply all" asking everyone else to "please take me off this distribution list."
3. A bunch of people will then chime in with "reply all" responses urging recipients to "STOP REPLYING WITH 'REPLY ALL' AS NO ONE CARES, AND HITTING 'REPLY ALL' IS REALLY ANNOYING!!!."
4. After the flurry of "reply all"s condeming the use of "reply all"s, some time will pass, and then someone on the list will have to follow up "reply all" with some kind of comment on the substantive message of the initial e-mail.
5. The comment will draw one last "reply all" condemning the use of "reply all"s, and then the round is over.
UPDATE: I switched (1) and (2) around, as I remembered that people usually don't start asking to be removed from the list until a handful of e-mails from the list are in their inbox.
To the extent there is ever a legitimate reason to do this, the trick is to put all those e-mail addresses in the "Bcc:" field so that the recipients don't see each other's addresses and couldn't reply-to-all even if they wanted to.
Some e-mail programs don't allow sending to only bcc: recipients, in which case the work-around is to make yourself the "To:" recipient and everyone else bcc: recipients.
That's standard in the southern regional release, Winders XP.
It works as advertised (I have personal interest in the product, fiduciary or otherwise).
What I really like is people who sign up on web sites that have a "Must confirm email addresss before account is active function who use software like Qurb. There software makes automatic demands that the web server sign up, or reply, or go to a web page to request permission to send, while the owner of same software/filter sends angry enail asking why his registration never completed to any adddress he can find...
Or maybe it's ok if you just note the irony. And then note the silliness of needing to note the irony, of course.
Fortunately, God intervened in crashing my computer and making Juno go to paid servies and me finding an internship at the State Department AND a boyfriend. By the time all that was fixed, nearly a year later, I was no longer in the habit and had lost that email file.
But even at my worst I never hit "reply all" -- in the worst case, it was a OneList/Egroups/Yahoo group, and I sent the standard email to the whole group. Usually when three or moer people re-forwarded the same, already debunked, email within the space of a week or less.
(though my tactics were unbearably self-righteous and smug and generally ill-advised, I did manage to train a few dozen women to stop sending out forwards... and I turned at least three of them into spam police. If only my campaign against HTML email in general and obnoxious stationary with unreadable background/font pairings in particular had been so successful.)
I once was a list and someone demanded to be taken off of it. (I don't know were the moderator was but he didn't respond). Several people replied back to the original poster, telling her, "Click the unsubscribe link at the bottom of the message". She refused to and demanded to be taken off the list. Eventually she started threatening anyone who posted to the list. (I eventually called the company she was posting from and complained to their IT department, they spoke to her).
http://www.langston.com/Fun_People/1996/1996ATD.html
So, first there was a mix of "What's up with this?" and automated "Your computer may be infected with a virus" messages, then a whole bunch of "Unsubscribes", and several "Quit replying, you're just spamming the list" explanations. It totaled over 100 messages before someone thought to contact the owner another way and he shut it down.
If you can get this number up enough through this or that trick, your thread becomes endless.
Because you intend to maximize the punishment of the original (dolt rather than evil) spammer by holding him up to the ridicule of people he hoped would respect his email.
Of course, this entire complaint is moot if the "click to unsubscribe" is an actual http address, which you can copy/paste if you don't receive as HTML (as it is on most of such messages I've seen).
Another point, though, is that any unsolicited mail that requires you to "unsubscribe" is dishonest. It is claiming that you have somehow "subscribed" to the spammer's list, when you haven't. Requests to "unsubscribe" from such lists usually just confirm to the spammer that you really exist and are a target for more mail.
Of course, so does flaming the spammer.
Some people use reply to all to complain that the complainers are chilling free speech.
I think that problem's been corrected since then, otherwise I'd have seen it a lot more.
When I worked at the FTC, they said there was actually no evidence that responding increased the amount of spam (after testing the theory), though I'd agree with the advice in any case.
Come now. That is the beauty of volokh.com (and of blogs in general): it is a mixture of serious thoughtfulness, humorous observations, and random musings. I, for one, appreciate a sprinkling of lighter "pieces of fluff".