Wednesday, November 28, 2007

And it probably came from me. Please accept my apologies, it was not my intent.

Early this morning I was online, checking for possible sales in my shop, and decided to check out Stumble Upon as a possible marketing tool for the business. So I was going to email a few strategic people (like my mother) to let them know of this resource and instead I inadvertently sent the email to my entire Gmail contacts list.

Here’s what happened - I was at the page where you can send an info email to folks and I signed into my Gmail account. On the page that came up there were two sections of people. The top section only had about a dozen people, all checked. I clicked the “Check All” box to uncheck all of them and then rechecked the three people that I wanted to send it to.

And then Beau came to remind me that it was time to get in the shower and in my hurry I clicked on the Send or Submit button before I noticed that the bottom section was all still checked. Turns out that the button doesn’t just send for that section but for the whole list. I figured that out when my email binged that I had a new message and I saw a message from myself. And my Gmail notifier started working as I got auto-replies from my utility companies and other such responses. That’s when the realization dawned of what just happened.

I had a good chuckle about in the shower later when I starting thinking of the hundreds of contacts in that list. I haven’t open my Gmail yet to see what’s in there.

[UPDATE 2:30pm]: Just logged into SU to find that people actually signed up in response to my spam. Hilarious!