[OS X TeX] away from my mail

[Jason Davies]

>
>You probably weren't there at the time, but an interesting episode
>occurred on 25-26 August 2004, when some user set up a spam filter
>identifying every message from the list as spam, reporting it, 

If I can indulge another anecdote, my favourite one was on the Mac OS X Applications list in the early days of OS X. Someone called Lough (I forget the second name) had an auto-responder that responded to itself. That was chugging away nicely producing about 1 message a minute for a while in his own self-sufficient infinite loop, until people on the list panicked and started posting 'what's going on?' messages for that exponential effect. The 700-odd messages in less than an hour before admin stopped them were not the biggest problem though: the problem was the absolutely hysterical emails that continued to arrive for weeks on teh list as people came to their mail late. All seemed to think they were being personally persecuted by the list, with some colourful language. Eventually a lot of people, myself included, left just because we were fed up of reading 'WHY ARE YOU DOING THIS YOU A******! WHY DONT YOU..(repeat ad nauseam for a few lines)' every hour or so...
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