Yes, I'm a Grumpy Geek

Or a Geeky Grump. Take your pick.

Sometime in the last few months, UNC must've changed something in their listserv or email properties to make it easy for people to send what are essentially SPAM to the University community. Because I have a UNC email account (I assume) I've gotten caught up in a lot of these mass broadcasts. Sometimes it's something useful, like about traffic flow during construction, but mostly it's stuff I don't care about. I have no problem deleting emails that don't relate to me, though, so I've just been deleting and ignoring.

But yesterday I got one announcing a local restaurant was donating some portion of it's beer sales to the Children's Hospital. Ok, no biggie -- I'm all in favor of beer, charities, and the Children's Hospital. I wasn't planning on having a beer, but, again, I have no problem deleting and ignoring.

But apparently there are those in the University Community who can't delete. Or ignore. Or something. And, sadly, these people feel compelled to reply to the email to vent their spleens (don't they know they should blog about it?!?!?), either not realizing or not caring that by sending mail back to the list server....they send it back to the list.

So, I got the initial email, then got, I kid you not, a half dozen replies in about 3minutes. One was a "Whoo, hoo, let's drink beer at work" comment, but the rest were all "Please remove me from your list" emails. One was even sent with High importance!

So here's why this bugs me so much:

1. It's the 21st century, people. Listservs aren't new technology. How to subscribe, post, and unsubscribe should be part of the basic training for any email user.
2. If a mailing list is purely for administrative purposes (as these all are), the admin should make sure it doesn't accept posts.
3. Even if someone weren't aware that replying would send an email to everyone on the list initially, they should be after the first reply. STOP sending more emails!! You people are like lemmings jumping off the cliff!

Now, yes, I think too much about this stuff. But honestly, people, is this that hard?