I thought I’d share a funny story from some years ago.
This was when I was subcontracting at a Certain Large Finnish Mobile Phone Maker.
It involved email and rickrolling.
Rickrolling a lot of people.
Start
One day I received an email. Nothing unusual about that, you’d get a lot of email in a large company. However, what follows was unusual.
I started getting emails from all kinds of random people, replying to this earlier email I had mostly disregarded. I took a better look at the emails, and noticed they were all being sent to a mailing list, with people obviously hitting Reply All – like they always did with all emails even if it only concerned one person.
The amount of emails just kept going up.
At one point, I realized the mailing list had all the employees, or at least all the subcontractors (they had a lot of subcontractors) on it!
The number of replies to the email thread constantly kept going up and up.
“Please don’t send me these emails anymore” – Reply All’d.
“Stop replying with Reply All” – Reply All’d.
Everything was going back on the mailing list.
The email servers were having obvious difficulties at handling the volume of email being sent thanks to the mailing list.
We were pretty much all laughing at it at this point – who had thought it would be a good idea to make a mailing list with tens of thousands of people on it, and then allow anyone to send email to it?
Then it hit me: Let’s rickroll the entire company.
I crafted a nice email:
Hi all
To unsubscribe from this email, please go to url-to-rickroll
(Disclaimer: may differ from actual email, it was years ago)
At this point we were worrying whether shenanigans like this would have repercussions – perhaps some higher-up wouldn’t enjoy the humor…
I decided to go ahead with it anyway. It was just a music video afterall.
And that’s how I rickrolled 15 000 or so employees with a single email
I had used bit.ly as the URL shortener, which had a nice stats tracking tool. We kept checking it and watched the numbers go up.
In the end, it was somewhere around 15 000. It might have even been bigger if the email servers hadn’t been shut down and the mailing list removed…
I got a few angry replies about it, but also many people thought it was pretty funny and actually recognized the joke.
End of story.
What do we learn from this? Never make an email list containing this many people, and definitely never ever make it possible for anyone to send emails to it.