The Great Mailing List Disaster of '94

You have new mail.

Oh goody... what's it all about?

21768 messages: Read?

Whaaat? I don't want to be that popular!

In mid-September subscribers of the normally rather quiet and mathematical FRAC-L Internet mailing list received exactly this disastrous flood of communication. At least four systems crashed under the load. Several subscribers had to beg their system operators not to withdraw their accounts. Subscribers receiving the mailing list through services which charge for incoming mail will have paid a large fortune. The Great Mailing List Disaster of 1994 had struck.

The tens of thousands of messages were chunks of encoded binary file -- supposedly yet another program to draw fractal images. Everyone in the field has noticed how bloated programs are getting recently, but this was ridiculous...

An Internet mailing list is supposed to be a form of communication for self-selected groups with a common interest -- like an 18th-century corresponding society, but a bit faster. When you subscribe to the list, all messages sent to the list by other subscribers are echoed to your mailbox, as are your responses.

At their best, mailing lists can be excellent, with a noise-to- signal ratio approaching one, compared to the nine typical of the more public Usenet newsgroups. At their worst, mailing lists can be... like this.

A hapless user at a British university (we'll spare their blushes and careers by forgetting their names) had, it seems, decided to share a new program with the members of the list. It seems that he made a mistake specifying what files to send. Result: an entire working directory posted to the list as "uuencoded" files, helpfully and silently split up by his mail program into chunks to get round the maximum-message-size restrictions of many other mail-reading programmes.

At least he got the right list. It would have been better, as other subscribers pointed out as calmly as they could, to make the program available on an ftp site.

The Internet being what it is, yet more bandwidth was wasted with a minor flame war. A typical measured response to the perpetrator: "I have work to do I haven't got time or resources to deal with your MANDELBROT shit. I now have about 20000 yes twenty fucking thousand fairly lengthy mail messages from you." Understandable, really. Another subscriber said they'd had to delete messages from potential customers to get their system back up, and presumably lost business. Yet another observed "It must be September" -- the traditional time for new student users to arrive on the net and cause havoc with repetitions of the tax-on- modems urban legend and such.

The prize for laconic response of the year goes to Wessel Ganzevoort (in Sweden): "Chaos at last!!!"

The moral of the story is: if you want to avoid instantly becoming one of the least popular people on the net, if not on earth: be very, very careful with those file specifications. And if you want to be absolutely sure of getting your business messages, it seems that it might be a good idea to set up a separate account to receive your mailing lists.