Crikey

How to win friends and influence people: the Business Council of Australia yesterday sent out an email containing Katie Lahey’s response to the Preventative Health Task Force report to its distribution list.

Several hundred times.

The numbers appear to have varied with recipient, but one recipient counted more than 600 copies of the same email in their inbox. In many cases it caused email programs to crash under the weight of the spam-alanche.

The email also contained the addresses of several hundred recipients, which in normal practice is hidden, giving everyone the email addresses of some of Australia’s most senior politicians, public servants and business people.

One recipient, following up a couple of reply-alls, offered this:

Three main BCA mistakes so far, plus a couple of consequentials:

First, spamming people who are supposed to be your friends.

Second, embarrassed maybe, but not apologising for the error.

Third, sending out your address list instead of sending to yourself and bcc-ing your list.

A consequential, offering an address list to all & sundry free of charge, hardly businesslike.

They then niftily took the opportunity to do some advertising themselves.

Another suggested the BCA had a virus and might want to check its systems stat.

Hopefully Lahey’s response was worth it.

From: Admin [mailto:admin@************]
Sent: Thursday, 3 September 2009 12:59 PM
To: brett@*********
Subject: Re: Preventative Health Report Shines Light on Health Challenges

Hello All,

For god sake, please don’t keep replying TO ALL with the emails exposed.

IT is clearly a virus and you are INCREASING the likeliehood of more and replicating the very thing that is annoying you.

I have had to do the same thing just to beg people to stop!

PLease DON’T reply to this….

Bill