Pet peeves

OK, I suppose one of my biggest electronic pet peeves are twofold, and involve people who spam multiple e-mail lists at once, without having the good sense to put those addresses in the BCC: section of the e-mail. Equally contemptible are those who then proceed to spam all of the mailing lists with "remove me" requests, which invariably spawn others.

The worst example of this was when I was an undergraduate, and someone sent an e-mail to several thousand students--but proceeded to list out the full e-mail of each and every student. So, not only was the message junk, but you had to scroll through 50 screens of e-mail addresses, and it took up about 50-75K per message--this was a lot back in the days when quotas of 4MB were still considered huge.

Of course, what happened is no surprise--some enterprising spammers on the list took it upon themselves to use this list to advertise their own spam, and then the chorus of "remove me's" and "me too's" began, clogging up inboxes for about a week. It was a royal pain in the neck--particularly when I learned that several of the "choristers" were students I was TA'ing. . . .