US Congress gets Spammed by Self

Posted by Hemos on Monday October 4, 1999 @04:36PM from the a-taste-of-the-real-world dept.

Doug Muth writes "There is an article on MSNBC's website that talks about a recent bout of spam that seriously bogged down some of the mailservers delaying message delivery for some users by "several hours". Maybe now that they got hit in the face with a spamming incident Congress will finally try to write some decent anti-spam legislation. " Heh - an aide to Rep. Alcee hastings (D-FL) sent out an e-mail to hundreds, potentially thousands of people on an internal mailing list - no BCC or majordomo, so when people hit "Reply All"...well. You can imagine the fun that ensued. The great part is that the letter was apparently recommending a weight loss pill.

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Funny? Try Scary by Alex+Pennace · 1999-10-04 11:50 · Score: 4

This incident is a laser pointer at the crux of the problem: our old guard politicians just aren't capable of handling today's technological world.

We need to get some geeks elected soon, or at the very least get the 18-24 demographic group into the polls.
Quotes from Congress... by The+Musician · 1999-10-04 12:03 · Score: 4
Here's some amusing quotes from the article in RollCall.
- I have 20 e-mails. It totally filled up my in-box.
- It's annoying. I've gotten so many of them and they're so large, it's made my system unstable today. It's crashed twice today.
- "Thanks, I need to lose 40 lbs.," the employee wrote in a reply -- to the whole House.
Wanna bet they're using Micro$oft?

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