“Re: Confirm” emails

February 27th, 2008 at 1:12 PM - Blogs by Ted Landau

My email today made for some amusing...as well as mildly irritating...reading with my morning coffee.

Filling up my Inbox were a collection of messages all with the same subject: "Re: Confirm." They were all from people on Apple's Weekly-kbase-changes mailing list, to which I subscribe.

The end of each mailing from Apple states: "Do not post admin requests to the list. They will be ignored." Apparently, someone ignored this request and did reply, possibly in response to some deliberate hacking email that solicited replies (I'm still not exactly sure how the entire cascade got started). In any case, this led to further replies, all of which were somehow sent out to everyone on the mailing list—which is how I started getting them.

Before it ended, I had received several dozen emails. Editing out redundancy, they went something like this:

"What is with all these confirm emails?" John

"I was wondering the same thing." Robert

"I am curious as well." Richard

"Beats me, Apple mail list got hacked I guess." Kerry

"I echo the same question. I think it has something to do with KBase updates ... or lack thereof." Steve

"I have received two such messages, and am at a loss to know why." Adair

"Hmm. I think that I didn't realize this was a public list, that anyone could post to, and a couple of folks were trying to confirm subscriptions, perhaps. My bad? I guess so. Didn't mean to set off a storm, haha." John

"SPAM. All on this list - PLEASE DO NOT SEND ANY REPLIES TO THE GROUP." Scott

"Gentlemen: I got a notice regarding the weekly kbase changes. I assume that I am being sent this email to see if I wish to continue. The answer is yes I enjoy the articles very much." Jim

"Please make the changes to prevent this from happening!!!" Greg

"Be interesting to know how many thousands around the world are receiving these emails." Tim

"Confirm what? Please advise." Liu

"JUST STOP REPLYING!!!" David

"Sorry guys, I do not have a clue what is going on...it feels like a Microsoft-Gates thing." Robert

"Will you please all stop replying. Let the situation get resolved and leave it alone. Thank you." Shane, Mac Genius

Not a big deal. I just thought that you might want to know.


Ted

P.S. Please do not confirm.

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Ted Landau is the founder of MacFixIt, and the author of Take Control of Your iPhone and other Mac help books.  You can contact Ted via .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address), Twitter, or post your polite comments below.