One of our companies primary businesses is mailing list hosting. A tidy little business,
in fact. The list serve software (Mailman) does all of the hard work, with allowing people
to subscribe and unsubscribe, and administrators to maintain their flock of subscribers.
The mail system Mailman is coupled to is a qmail system, sleek and fast. Damned fast,
in fact. Really damned fast.
Asides from the occasional kick start of Mailman, things run fairly well.

Except when you throw customers into the mix.
I just don't get it. What makes them so dumb?
How can you possibly own a computer and be this utterly clueless?

A list serve is a fairly powerful tool. For both good and evil. We host non-profit lists
dedicated to medical research and stamping out AIDS, and we host lists which distribute
a daily jokes list to some hundred thousand happy subscribers out there. As Peter Parker's
uncle once said, 'With great power comes great responsibility'. Of course, hand in hand with
cluelessness is a diminished sense of responsibility. I marvel at this, frequently, that
people who don't begin to understand the situation they've gotten themselves into must
therefore blame the consequences on someone else. They don't know better to say 'I did it'
or 'I didn't do it', but the answer that immediately comes out of their mouths is 'Someone else!'.
Back to the point.
Take, for instance, the chap that set up a list with a small subscriber list, somewhere around
500 subscribers. The list was new, it was running, his subscribers were bantering on to each
other, as subscribers do. Everything with A OK. And then the fellow had to get fiddly. "It works
now, surely when I screw with it, I'll make it work so much better!".
I'm not entirely sure why, but the guy decided that subscribing the list serve to itself
was a good idea.

I'm reminded of the fabled glossary entries:
Endless Loop: See Infinite Recursion
Infinite Recusion: See Endless Loop

How is the above relevant?
I am a mailing list, my name is dorklist@here.com. I have a list of subscribers. I receive a post
from one of my devoted subscribers. I pick up my subscriber list, and I sent a mail to every
one of them. Including dorklist@here.com, which is just another address to me. And, hey presto,
someone just sent me a new mail! I'd better send it out again. And again. And again. And again.
Remember when I said our mail system was crazy fast? Imagine how many eMails I can send out
to these poor subscribers ad infinitum, when I'm in a perpetual looped state, and I can process
about 600,000 eMails an hour?
Given the amount of time for the aforementioned squirrel brained cretin to realise what's going on
and alert us, and then us to shut the whole clusterschmuck down, work out WHY the daffy thing
is looping, and then go around and clean up all of the spooled outgoing messages... Well, you
can imagine there are 500 subscribers that are pretty pissed off.

Just a few days ago, I was reminded of this waking nightmare when a list serve admin managed
a similar cock up.
Our friendly customer (cough) has had a list for some time, which he uses to tell his customers
about what's going on in his business. While it is an announcement list (One which is not
supposed to accept comments from subscribers), he's never actually turned on the moderation
ticker - which means the users are actually in discussion mode (All users can post to the list,
and their mails redistributed to other users).
This has worked, however, for many moons without problem - because no one on the list has ever
bothered trying to send a post in. Until last week.
An announcement goes out on the Tuesday. On Thursday morning, at 1am, someone for the first
time responds, cc'ing to both the list AND the list owner. Had the list been correctly
configured, the list would have ignored the mail, and only the list owner retrieved it. However,
it was not. So every member on the list received the mail. And one by one they responded, with
eMails like "Who are you, and why are you posting from this address! Spam! Phishing! Hackers!"
This was a slightly larger list, of some 19,000 subscribers. Forty eMails went out, before we
tripped the list and shut it down. 40x19000 = 760,000 eMails.
Our customer is waving his hands around in the air, screaming 'It worked fine last week! This
has never happened before! You must have a virus!'. Yah, sure.
'I was a programmer, these things happen!'. You were a programmer? So this means you therefore
understand everything about our infrastructure and can generalise that because viruses affect
Windows-using nonces the world over, we are therefore as useless a shower of twats and
suffer the same inept fate?
I think not, my pasty friend.

The mailing list gives an awful lot of power in the hands of people who probably shouldn't have
made it through puberty, let alone into adulthood and become the masters of a list of multiple
thousand of poor internet going sods who have no clue what they're in for. What is the solution?
To stop selling our services? Nope, I like to feed my wife and child.
To personally vette out each client, to gauge their cluefulness? Take too long.
To maintain all the list serves ourselves, taking the responsibility? We don't get paid that much.
And when you can head over to Yahoo! eGroups and cause the same kind of harrowing damage for
free, would it matter?

The responsibility lies in you. Be careful who you give your eMail address to, because there's
nothing quite like waiting for Eudora to download 25,000 eMails from a single list serve 'cos
you really wanted to keep abreast of how their doily crocheting company is going.
Do you really trust Grandma Floyd enough to give her your eMail address?