About three days ago I was CC’ed on a spam email. We all know what to do with spam. We ignore it, and it gets auto deleted. The people who were also CC’ed on this spam apparently didn’t know this. Instead they responded to the spam via Reply All. That reply then went to the spammer and was automatically sent to everyone on the CC list. Which, of course, means that they sent their replies to everyone.
300 emails later, I now present to you day three of the Spam Chain Letter. Every line corresponds to an email. Every letter stands for a different sender’s first name and they are marked with numbers to keep them separate.
G0: Stop. Remove me.
A: Pls remove me.
J: Same… get me out of here.
G: Please stop emailing me. You have the wrong person.
H1: I didn’t email you. More likely we have both been hacked .
I: We have all been hacked.
J: Stop. I reported your dumb ass
G1: Hello, are you sure you copied this to an inconvenient email? I have no idea what this refers to.
G2: I’m not even on the list of addresses, so I’m not sure why I’m on this chain. Any tax advice in this e-mail should be considered in the context of the tax services we are providing to you. Preliminary tax advice should not be relied upon and may be insufficient for penalty protection.
H2: Dirty c**ts, I hope they choke to death on a bag of broken glass.
G3: While we are all connected. Are there any horny women in here that could use some company?
C: Yeah where are the horny women??????????
F: If anyone is looking for a solid podcast while we’re all getting spam, might I recommend REDACTED? If you’re into weird Satanic Panic content from the 80s. It’s a hell of a ride (no pun intended).
H4: ?????? What do you want from me ????
G4: I’ve notified the FBI and MI6 as well as a counter-cyber-terrorism mercenary unit to find the scumbag that started this and bring him to justice!!!! In fewer words…. patience people. It will probably die out soon.
B: LOL! Oh my gosh, I just got off work and now im checking my email… The saucy comments, this made my day!!
F1, 4 emails in a row: Not from me!
G5: Why are you continuing to send me emails. Stop
I2: Hey…..I am NOT sending you guys anything. I’m getting strange email as well as you.
I’ve changed my password in hopes that that will help.
I3: I don’t know how anyone on this email chain has gotten my email. I thought these spam messages were over. Please remove me from this scam. Any unauthorized purchases and communications is being reported as fraud.
G2: It’s not coming from me.
F2: Same here. I am in Scotland and getting hammered with this spam.
F: For more Satanic Panic content, listen to my podcast: REDACTED.
C: This podcast stinks.
Original spammer: Fake Paypal Invoice
J: Invoice deez nuts.
F3: My wife and I are volunteers amount over 9 million in over 240 lands -and as a united people in over 1200 languages we assist honest hearted ones who seek a global peace in a the soon to be restored planet earth. Take a look at a few short video clips you can access by going to REDACTED and put in the questions you have about your concerns and questions many have asked like
“Why study the Bible?”
“Why does God permit suffering ?”
“Why did Jesus die?”
If you would like to have regular free assistance in your study of the Bible please don’t hesitate to contact my wife & I or any one of Jehovahs Witnesses…
I2: STOP STOP STOP REPLYING TO THE DAMN EMAIL
J2: I am blocking them
By hitting the arrow
And going to bottom where it say block
I am not sending those emails
H4: Don’t reply to this email any more.
You’re receiving these emails because you’re on a list that belongs to “noreply…@REDACTED.shop”.
Every time “noreply…@REDACTED.shop” receives an email, it automatically BCC’s in thousands of other users like you.
Do not reply any further, and the spam chain will break.
Your email probably hasn’t been hacked, so you don’t need to stress.
K: I don’t know who you are. I’m not sending any email. You’re obviously confused. Stop sending me email or report you to the law enforcement.
G6: if anyone needs a tarot reading, let me know lol.
We could use a tarot reading after that, dear G6. Hehehehe. Happy Monday.
That was great!! So bad and funny at the same time! Thanks for sharing the neverending email.
lol, how have I missed this? Efficient spam filter, or auto-deleting anything that looks like spam? I haven’t missed it much, though. Thank you for sharing!
🤣🤣🤣🤣
lol!
dear G6.
what a slice of humanity!
Ahh, the blind cc’d list. LOL Too funny but also, too many emails!
How many people reading this immediately went to their spam folder to check for that e-mail. I know I did.
“invoice deez nuts” cracked me up 🤣
Top tier email
Yeah, I laughed out loud at that one. Then I felt guilty about it. 😜
H2 Made me laugh out loud.
Love G6…
😆
A hacker currently has control of my husband’s facebook and so could be why H2 made me snort. (We’ve tried all things and all the Reddit rabbit holes and links)
🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣 Oh my gosh! Why, why, why do people have to hit “reply all” to an email?
I get this at work sometimes. I’m like “what does this have to do with me?” Then I get the 101 emails saying “don’t hit reply all to this email.”
I also get the blast email from the property owner of my apartment. The person keeps having to say if you already have a zero amount, ignore the email. This is because the place where I live the person who was the property manager is on “maternity leave”. The leave started way back in March. So either she’s not coming back or the owners are leaving her spot open for if or when she ever decides to come back. 🤦♀️
Likewise, I’ll get something at work where they sent it to everyone and they put everyone in the To or CC field and when everyone does reply all, we all get the reply. I’ve also gotten some autogenerated emails from some system that sent them as a mistake, but they sent them every 2 minutes or so. I now have a permanent folder in my Outlook named 0_RogueEmails and every time one of these situations occurs, I modify a rule to focus on those emails and shoot them directly to that folder as soon as they come in. It’s kind of fun to see how many pile up. Then I can do a bulk delete or “mark as read”.
Check to see if your email client has an ‘Ignore Conversation’ option – If you use that on the chain, it will take care of the ‘straight to deleted items’ process for you instead of needing to set up your own rules for it.
I sadly have to use this at least once a month due to large distros not being locked down at my company. The number of times a project distro was left active or accessible to non-distro members and generated days of reply-all idiocy…
How. How can anyone in this day and age not know how email works?
I call it the First Day on the Internet Syndrome 🤣. It affects so many people, occasionally me too
☺️
This 😂reply all in email and text drive me bonkers
3rd email i’d be setting up a filter. Reminds me of the guy who had a list called “everybody” meaning everybody in his department and he accidently sent a birthday party reminder to the entire Fortune 100 company including everyone at the Italian site and the plant in Mexico.
We ended up having to take a mandatory class on why you don’t Reply All unless you really need to.
Oops! 😂
I had something similar happen to me when I started at the hospital system I’m still at now.
I bet the people in Italy and Mexico thought “uh?” when the got it. 🤔
I wonder how many would have shown up 😂
My employer set up a pop up prompt for Outlook where if you have more than one recipient you need to confirm that’s what you intended. Its been here since I started but I imagine there were reasons for it.
Hubby and daughter both work on a military base as government civilians. Their unholy glee at the roasting a baby lieutenant recieved after sending out an email to Global:All (which goes to everyone working for the Department of Defense – active duty military and civilians/contractors) was hilarious.
🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣
Oh, good gravy!! I’m a bit surprised that there aren’t any controls limiting who can use “Global:All”.
Oh nooooo. I am baffled that people still don’t understand spam, reply all and the BCC function in the year of our Lord Bridgerton, 2024 🫣😆
Blind CC’s prevent people from doing a Reply All and you seeing it. You WANT people to do BCCs. Its the CC that is the portal to email hell dimension.
This sounds like a regular old CC event. Which should not be allowed. Like ever.
The problem is that most email applications/systems, in my experience, don’t automatically provide the BCC field. You have to click a button to show it. I am guilty of putting a distribution group in the To or CC fields and immediately after clicking send realize I should have put the distro group in the BCC field.
Personally, if the email software (e.g., Outlook) is smart enough to provide suggested responses (Thanks! Sounds good! Ok!) then it should be smart enough to pop up a warning first that says “are you sure you want to blast this out to everyone in the group”. I mean, it sort of does that by telling me how many people are in the group, but that’s a bit too subtle for me. I need a “don’t be a dumbass” prompt.
me too! 😂 I have to constantly remind myself not to be a dumbass 🤣
What really got my goat is that when I was helping a friend out with her new computer, I noticed that in the new Outlook 365, on a smaller laptop screen, reply all is shown as the default option, rather than reply to sender 😭
O_O
Nothing good can come of that.
How do people not know how to reply to sender versus reply to all by now???
I’ve gotten group texts from an unknown number with multiple unknown numbers in the group – those are much easier to block and delete fortunately.
Thanks for the morning chuckles!
Thanks for the laugh.
Speaking of replying to spam, this is the funniest – https://youtu.be/4o5hSxvN_-s?si=WEegLKoX9RUn3apy
That was hysterically funny. Thank you so much for posting the link.
Also watched definitely a good laugh!! I have 5 emails running plus I run my elementary kiddos email and HS kiddo emails through my phone too. I’m sooo over the damn spam.
Very smart and very funny!
Thank you! In tears of laughter again lol
Thank you for that! I laughed so hard I almost peed my pants! I really needed that. It’s what I’ve always wanted to do but didn’t have the nerve for.
OMG, thank you! I was in such a bad mood until I watched that. That was hilarious!
Years ago, I had a similar experience at my job. Someone sent out an email to one of the preset distribution lists and sent it to the whole company rather than the local group they intended. People started replying and then replying to the replies. It finally had to shut down the whole system and purge all the emails.
Yes, it sounds funny but I bet you are ready to tear your hair out because you don’t have extra time to deal with this nonsense.
I didn’t think that’s how BCC worked. I have a list – one that my neighbors have opted in to – that I use for organizing social events, and I BCC everyone, so that they can’t hit reply all. Fascinating!
Also that was hilarious.
Reply All doesn’t go to those BCC’d – BUT if one of those addresses is a maillist server or group email (that essentially sends through any email to that address to a list of BCC’d folks like an old Yahoo or Google group) – it essentially does the same thing AND gets you the email address of whoever replied and you have a target for futher spam. It’s also HIGHLY likely at least one or 2 of those reply alls was, or was someone working with the spammer to egg on folks to reply.
That would make me insane in short order…. In other news, I hope you to are recovered enough for DragonCon!! My husband and I staffed it way back in 1997 for a track we were a part of and it was exhausting then! It’s so much bigger now! We’ll be thinking of you both!
Those poor souls. Thanks for the funnies.
I just LOVE the “please remove me” reply alls or reply to the “email list” with everyone in the BCC. I typically don’t use the “remove me” links (it just confirms there’s a person) – I’ve started to just Report Spam for anything that I have no idea how I got on said list. But yeah, these can get amusing when folks with 0 tech savvy are on the list.
The ONLY thing worse than this is a former boss (who apparently has political leaning the opposite of me) included me in a group SMS\MMS chat to gab about X political thing in the news at the time – about 1.5 months ago. You CANNOT “leave” those and other than blocking ALL of the #’s, there’s nothing you can do. I learned things I wish I could unlearn (and while the possibility of me being an employee of his again was pretty low – it is now 0).
I waited it out and eventually it stopped after a couple of days but I was pretty close to completely abandoning contact (because I know replying to please remove me would just escalate).
I guess we’ll see as we get closer to November.
this is what I do at work to large group emails that cc/bcc everyone.
Ignore a conversation
In the message list, select the conversation or any message within the conversation that you want to ignore.
On the Home tab, in the Delete group, select Ignore . If you are working from an open message, on the Message tab, in the Delete group, select Ignore.
Select Ignore Conversation
I’m not saying I looked for a podcast named redacted about the satanic panic of the 1980s – but I’m also not saying I didn’t.
“These annoyed people seem like the perfect audience for my podcast”
F, probably.
Too funny
You want a tarot reading…..
The answer is : 64% water, 35% carbohydrates, and negligible protein and fat
What?
Sorry that was a taro reading
Tarot readings are two doors down.
Now this is my type of Taro reading. Of course I would cross your palm (tree) with silver for it if I were able, but thymes are tight.
There was an instance like this at my company about 15 years ago- it took down the Exchange Servers. It is called Bedlam. It is legend.
no words….
Our new bad actor email at work was what looked like a voicemail message from a real employee. I deleted it and sent a phishing alert to our IT department because there was no reason why she would send me a voicemail. But apparently several people tried to listen to it, which downloaded who knows what and then sent the same fake voicemail lure, but from this new person. It was a nightmare and ended up with the entire agency having to reset all our passwords.
Fun times.
Huh, did not know that was a thing, actually appreciate the heads up ☺️
I got a warning by my credit card company that my data is now on the dark web.
Not fun. You win.
🤣😂
Thank you!!!
LOL!
I’m sure this was more entertaining to read than it was to see all 300 messages clogging up your Inbox, but this made my day!
Never underestimate how opportunistic people are to pimp their podcast, try to loop you into their church, or hunt for horny women, even if using spam to do so! 🙂
Wow. What memories that brings back. This used to happen at the agency I worked at and someone would send an email to the wrong alias and -epilepsy would hit reply to all and the there was disaster. There was actually an edict sent down not to reply. I haven’t thought of that since I retired.
And I get reminders to keep everyone in the loop 🤪
Not related to the post, but I don’t think the Blue Willow Q&A YouTube has been shared on the blog yet:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aee2-jPQ4-U
We have shared the link to the Blue Willow YouTube account and notice that the Q&A will be updated in two separate articles 🙂 , but not a special post for it, no.
This happened years ago at a certain govt agency where someone at a lab sent out an email asking “Has anyone seen my lost blue salamander, escaped from research lab XX” but sent it to ALL the emails for the agency across the US. We then saw replies from, yes, people in other states/regions saying, in effect, “No, your lost salamander has not been seen in (name of location 1000 miles away)”. It was hilarious for a while but the higher-ups were NOT amused when the servers started crashing…
And in other news: Received by new t-shirts last week and I love love love them!
ROFL. Where are the horny men? The women seemed to be overly represented.
G3 had me in stitches.
The oportunism runs strong in that one.
Thanks for sharing.
It’s quite funny if it’s not my inbox
I laughed and laughed. Thanks for sharing!
The didn’t use BCC if you’re getting Reply All.
They used CC.
And this is why to use BCC. With BCC you have no way to reply-all.
IF they set you all up on some sort of bizarro mailing list…. 1. Eww and 2. That could also allow Reply All.
when I get these, I remove myself, and then block everyone else individually. it takes time, but I would rather do that than deal with the messages.
This used to happen (in a manner of speaking) at my work when someone would reply all on an existing email chain about an unrelated issue that didn’t effect the entire CC’d group. Days later I would still be getting emails about it and emails asking to please remove unrelated persons from what should have been a new email. But you’d have to at least check them, because the subject would be from the issue you were involved in, and as soon as you assume and delete without reading it would inevitably be one you needed…
Maybe I’m missing something (I haven’t had my coffee yet), but if you receive an email where everyone has been bcc’d, you won’t get any responses from anyone else. You can’t, because they don’t have access to your email. Or is this a joke?
Ah, my … while I know intellectually that there are folks out there that are weirder than me, it’s nice to see proof of it now and again. BTW, where would I sign up for the tarot reading? Chortle.
This is hilarious. Why does this still happen??? Something like this happened at my office. We are global company with thousands of employees. One poor guy sent a fundraising email for his 10k run to the ENTIRE firm instead of his group. Outlook literally froze because so many people replied all to the email saying “please take me off this email” and “stop replying all” . Tech had to remove the entire email chain from our global servers.
The guy did raise over $5k though. I gave him $5 cuz why not! his original goal was $500.
🤣🤣🤣
LOL, this was so funny!!! Thanks for sharing. I’m sure this has happened to me too with an office email ID as well HAH!
OMG!!! Online gone amok! People are cra cra.
Oh! I’ve got a fun one. Back in the day, when some people didn’t know any better and looked at p*rn at work, one guy was sending his buddy a “video”. His buddy had the same last name that matched names with a distribution list for the entire bank. His video went to EVERYONE. I remember my boss tearing out of his office yelling across the floor to everyone, “Don’t open the link to XYZ email!!”
Needless to say, the original sender was let go so fast, I’m sure his desk chair was left spinning. His buddy claimed total ignorance (ha-right). It’s been office legend for a decade or two…..
These response were funny.
Sadly this has happened a couple of times at work years ago. Someone accidentally sent out a mtg invite to the whole company about – 150K people.
And everyone started responding with “why am I in this mtg”. Followed by “Stop Replying All “
We work at a tech company, mind you.
No funny responses from work people. 😞
Hysterical! Had me in stitches! Sorry for the grief, but it makes for a funny ass post 😉
C’mon Ilona, you know you and Gordon wanted to chime in…what would you have said and which reply would have gotten you?
Boomers and Zoomers are equally perplexed by technology. I don’t know whether that’s hilarious or sad.
owww. yikes. no words….
Hilarious, since it’s not me dealing with it. Sorry you had to!
Laughed until the tears washed all my makeup off. Thank you for sharing this well-edited tribute to the utter absurdity of humanity. 😂
“Reply All” is such a toxic feature that it once took down Microsoft’s *internal email system*.
At the time, corporate culture had a bunch of pompous idjits responding to internal mailing lists with “take me off this list, I’m too far busy to deal with your petty concerns”, but they’d “reply all” so that all the peons who could appreciate it.
Then someone sent a message that cc’d @all. And all the twits reply all-ed–including @all–which triggered another round of petty reply all responses. The “begone, peasant” emails grew exponentially until the Redmond system went to its knees. Mwahahahaha.
Ooooh, two of these, one about something free from Temu and one “from” Shein, arrived at my work address this week…
When I say arrived, my spam filter actually ate the original messages, but one of the other addresses on the list had an autoresponder saying something like “your ticket xyz has been created” – which was the first I saw of both.
But then people started to actually respond quite earnestly to that 😀
lol this reminds me of NHS email-gate from a few years ago.
Some poor sod accidentally emailed the entire NHS.net email list.
This is over 1 million accounts I imagine at least.
Some people replied all to say it was an error and why were they getting an email etc…
IT SHUT DOWN THE ENTIRE EMAIL SYSTEM FOR THE NHS FOR DAYS.
We went back to fax machines to send prescriptions, medical records etc…
It was a right pain
Oh my, laughing so hard I’m crying 🤣
Omg. It’s funny, but I’m glad I’m not part of it.
OMG this is hilarious
So worth the effort of sharing! Thanks!!
Ah, Mercury Retrograde strikes again at communications. Be of good cheer all. Mercury goes direct tomorrow August 28. I know I’ll be breaking out the party hats then. It’s been a rough ride this time around.
So sorry you got spammed, but the responses were 🤣
a lot of g.
A former boss did a reply all and sent a photo of him and his girlfriend to ~4000 people. Many of whom forwarded the email to his wife. The divorce judge was not impressed. I used it in my next three companies as an IT training example of a very expensive mistake. Do not reply all, some learn and some don’t.
😂😂😂
A vendor once managed to find the company email address that mailed all staff and send an invoice. All 15,000 of us at that point. Therein began the 2-3 hour ordeal of the people who didn’t get that they shouldn’t respond. 100 or so people saying it wasn’t for their office. 200 or so asking be to dropped off the list. 50 people mocking all the people for responding to all and so on round and round. I think we had over 1,000 emails by the time IT actually shut it down completely.
I’m not sure to this day if it was phishing or an actual vendor who got the wrong email address. It was lesson about not replying all. Also don’t open anything out of the blue that you aren’t excepting and the email language is weird. Even if it is someone you work with. Pick up the phone and call them to confirm it is actually them if you think something is weird. Spoof emails happen all the time.
I am dying here!
Ha! It’s so much funnier when it isn’t happening to you.
Several years ago, I worked for a very large, global corporation. Some poor sap managed to find the (at)everyone email address and sent a legit business email, but to the whole company instead of the small group he was attempting. The same sort of chatter commenced and by the time I woke up the next morning (company was British and the original email came from London), I had more than 5000 emails. My coworker had over 8000. Our IT had to shut down and purge the system to stop it, just like it was an actual DOS attack.
You can bet they put more controls on who could send an email to everyone after that.
Am I the only one wishing to be able to forward the spam to a Liam Neeson Taken-like service that will take care of it all with that signature chilling reply?
Dead 💀🙈😂
i love how several replies are “stop responding to this e-mail.” thay are going against their own advice 😂
lol I had a good laugh at this
so where are all the horny women???
:))))))))))))))))))