A mailing list mess up by the Admissions Office has led to anger among prospective students and sparked a mass email debate which has degenerated into profanity, racism and abuse. As a result of the hundreds of thousands of emails generated by the mistake, Microsoft blocked all mail from Oxford University accounts to services including Hotmail and Windows Live for almost a week.
A mailing list mess up by the Admissions Office has led to anger among prospective students and sparked a mass email debate which has degenerated into profanity, racism and abuse.
As a result of the hundreds of thousands of emails generated by the mistake, Microsoft blocked all mail from Oxford University accounts to services including Hotmail and Windows Live for almost a week.
The glitch resulted in everybody who signed up online for a copy of this year’s prospectus online being added to a mailing list which all other members could, and did, reply to.
“An email list was created but misconfigured in such a way that recipients hitting ‘reply all’ responded to all users on the list, which normally is not permitted on this kind of list,” said a University spokesperson.
“Many list members external to Oxford [replied to the whole mailing list] and it resulted in more than a million email messages being sent.”
The barrage of emails sent to the whole list triggered furious responses.One commenter, Mayur Patel, launched personal and xenophobic attacks on other members of the list.
Patel sent the message, “wat part of shut the fuck up do you not understand” and later replied to criticism from another commenter saying, “fuk yu too kazernovsky…dont chat to me like you bloody know me…fukin prick comin here stealing our jobs and claiming benefits fukin up the whole system of this country”.
Oxford University declined to comment on the content of emails circulated via the list.
By the time Admissions realised the problem and shut down the mailing list on September 26th, members had received between 400 and 500 hundred emails each. Thousands these had been destined for Hotmail, Live and MSN email addresses.
Microsoft responded by barring all emails from Nexus accounts from September 27th, causing further frustration amongst students.
As of Monday 3rd October Microsoft has lifted its ban on emails from University accounts, though one student commented, “I started getting emails through this morning although they’re sporadic, not in order, and some of them still aren’t through.”
OUCS explained, “We believe the Microsoft blacklisting has been removed but we have to be extremely careful not to re-trigger it with too much mail too quickly. OUCS intends therefore to start releasing the queued mail in batches.”
Cherwell was told, “The University apologises unreservedly for the inconvenience caused to recipients. The problem was resolved very quickly and is not ongoing.”
Initially, the mailing list became aware of the glitch when one prospective student made the mistake of pressing ‘Reply All’ when sending the Office an email asking why his prospectus had not been delivered.
The message read, “Thank you very much but I have not received the prospectus yet despite ordering it online twice? If you need to phone, please can you contact my Dad, Many thanks, Will Archibald” and was sent to all the list members, generating numerous emails from others wondering why they received that email.
One current student had signed up to the list earlier this year to order a prospectus for his sister and on September 25th was surprised at the volume of emails he was receiving.
“Emails were arriving at the rate of two or three per minute. After a couple of hours of people asking why they were getting everyone else’s emails, the vogue shifted to demanding very loudly that they be taken off the list, as if some great email overlord was watching the entire clusterfuck and toying with us,” he said.
There soon evolved a vicious e-circle of futile emails being sent to the mailing list.
“In the anarchic space of the internet, the hivemind of prospective students lost all sense and became entirely devoid of reason. Many replied whining about how bad Oxford is. Many, many people replied saying something along the lines of ‘Look guys, I know this is hypocritical, but if you all stop replying, this will stop.’ For an hour or two, my inbox was filled constantly with people excepting themselves from their rule to suggest, often in caps, that others stopped replying,”
“All told, by the time that Admissions realised what they had done and killed off the mailing list for good, I’d received maybe 400 or 500 hundred emails (including one from Andrew Archibald, apologising for what his son had unwittingly set in motion),” recounted the student.
In a separate yet similar case, PPE students got an irritating surprise when they were forwarded, more than 80 times, one email from Daniel Wilkes to Liz Frazer regarding lectures on Bentham.
“This dude, Daniel Wilkes, sent me 84 emails. I thought I was really popular for a second there,” commented St Hilda’s PPEist Ana Bonnington.
Accounting for the error, the University said, “There was an error in the WebLearn archiving process; such technology glitches happen occasionally and the department apologises for the inconvenience caused.”
