The Day the Emails Wouldn’t Stop
Student’s emails are back in order after a flood of reply-alls that caused patience to wear thin and pockets to vibrate.
On Sept. 13, hundreds of emails flooded students’ inboxes causing an influx of complaints due to the mishap.
The problem started with an email that was sent out to all students by UNCP’s DoIT.
The email, which was intended to serve as a news update for students, experienced difficulties when the it was prematurely sent out.
Students who wished to be unsubscribed began replying with their email handle while inadvertently sending the email out to every UNCP student with their reply.
Some students decided that this email mix-up was the perfect time to promote their own social media.
Other students were begging people to stop replying and even cussing, due to the frustration of the email, while a couple of students were making light-hearted jokes about the situation.
“If my phone bill go up, ya’ll pitching in,” one student replied. While another said, “Please unsubscribe me, I’m trying to study.”
One of the last students to reply jokingly said, “Let my people go!”
Thankfully, around four hours after the first email had been sent, everyone was unsubscribed from the email and the chaos was over.
Shortly after being unsubscribed, the Associate Vice Chancellor for Technology Resources and CIO, Nancy Crouch, sent out an apology email saying that they have rectified the situation.
“We have deleted the listserv and will be careful not to repeat our mistake,” the email said.
While some considered this a crazy situation, our campus isn’t the first to have a mass email sent out.
In 2012, NYU had a mass email incident which they entitled the “Email Reply-Allpocalypse”.
NYU, which at the time had almost 40,000 students, had an accidental email flub when a student accidentally hit reply-all to a reminder that was sent to students about their tax forms. People started to reply with memes when they realized what had happened.
According to Tyler Kingkade of the Huffington Post, “People began using the email thread to share photos of Nicolas Cage, to ask if they could borrow a pencil and to pose the query: ‘Would you rather fight 100 duck- sized horses, or 1 horse- sized duck?’”
He went on to say that the email was deleted the next morning.
Fortunately, thanks to our school’s IT team, the problem was found quickly and dealt with in a timely manner.
Still, students and IT workers alike, will never forget the day the emails wouldn’t stop.
