Slightly Off Center

Twenty new messages today alone; six of the "Take me off this list, dammit!" variety, the remainder various automatic responders creating more support tickets.

Yesterday, there were death threats.

My email inbox is a horror show right now. About a week ago, I got a spam email from somebody selling their SEO skills. I trashed it, per usual, thought nothing more of it. Until my inbox starting filling up with angry replies.

They had tried something clever--created a single address that expands to dozens, perhaps hundreds of recipients. One message, huge coverage!

Except they used the same address for their Reply-To. So all the angry emails replying also got sent out to those hundreds of recipients. Creating more emails. It's effectively a Reply-All cascade.

This afternoon, when I checked my mail, there were eight messages in the Inbox, and another ten in the Spam folder. There were over twenty yesterday. About a quarter of them are auto-reply messages: So-and-so is out of the office or We no longer take requests via email, please use our web portal. The remainder are increasingly angry messages demanding to be removed from the mailing list. This afternoon, someone sent a Test message to the address, I think to confirm for themselves what was happening, and now they're getting angry replies. Sent to the same spam email address.

I'm torn between two reactions: 1. Sending out an email explaining what the dynamic is and reminding folks that all they have to do to make this go away is stop replying, or 2. Making some popcorn and sitting back to watch how long the thing goes on.

ETA: Thought the party had died down, with no new messages on Tuesday. Nope, six more this morning. sigh.