Orcon SPAMS its customers this afternoon by using generic email group

Generic email groups used to be the best thing since sliced bread.....unless you accidentally manage to get it stuck in a continuous loop emailing your customers!
I came back from a meeting to an inbox FULL of emails from what looked like Orcon's Service Desk. 



I bet the data_all@orcon.net.nz email address has since been deleted and the poor person who managed to do this,  to my guess hundreds or possibly thousands of customers is feeling pretty stink about now.


I think I'd run too.  Maybe pretend it wasn't me?  I do love the reaction some people have had in return emails.. here are a few I saw.

From a simple :

"WTF is going on here, sort it please. You have a mail loop".  

Then there was  email shouting :

"FIX YOUR SERVICE DESK NOTIFICATIONS!  20 emails so far (including out of office replies) before any work has even been done."

 

The best one however, was the following that and simply said "Guys you are sending these to everyone"

 

Now if you thought about this really, really clearly before hitting "send"...would you first check who you are replying to? Would you hit "Reply All" to this sort of email and expose your email address and contact details to oh, a few thousand people further clogging up what limited bandwidth NZ has left!!  I wonder how those people are now feeling?  Clever?

The thing that is even more amusing is clearly some of the email addresses on Orcons Group were peoples helpdesk/ service desk systems generic email addresses.  The response emails have now gone and logged yet another ticket in those customers systems automatically, which has then fired off another email to tell them there is a new request.  Awesome!   Ours is one of those :-(

Now we have poor helpdesk administrators all over town trying to clean up the resulting mess in their helpdesk systems too!

Come on guys, fess up- we've all made technology mistakes. 

If nothing else this incident reminded me of the time I set a rather large government bodies entire production general ledger to -3cents.  I still remember the feeling of panic- slightly between thinking I was going to be sick on the spot to passing out.  Needless to say, I did fix the problem after many hours of work into the night and I will never in my life forget the impact it had either!

So when this sort of thing happens- look on the bright side of life- I just deleted 50 emails....without opening them.  Man, that felt good!

So what's you major technology blunder- come on guys share, I know we've all done at least one....