Epic mailing list at VMWare

    VMWare has always been somewhat free to use email addresses received from partners. I mean, they didn’t go “to the left”, but finding yourself signed up for yet another newsletter about a New and Very Promising Product is easy.

    The same applies to all kinds of events.

    The practice is not very laudable, but still bearable. That was until a certain point, until VMWare added these addresses to the next mailing list: russia-cis-partners at lists.vmware.com.

    This was done using mailman, and mailman himself is not aware that there is such a mailing on his server: lists.vmware.com/mailman/listinfo/russia-cis-partners A

    subscription message has arrived . There was no newsletter yet, how ...

    ... as it turned out, that everyone can write to this newsletter. And away we go. I remember there was a similar story a few years ago when several tens of thousands of indignant letters went through the mailing list asking them to unsubscribe (and each such letter came back to all the other indignant ones, causing the appearance of new indignant ones), it seems that it was in some kind of municipal mailing list, if anyone remembers, poke.

    So, exactly the same situation.



    At the moment, there are more than 500 letters in this “discussion list”. To which very respected people turned out to be (and responded to): project development managers, heads of IT departments, system integration departments, IT consulting, commercial directors, etc. In other words, if I needed a carefully verified database of business contacts in the IT industry with live emails, then here it is, in the mailbox.

    ... And even more fun is expected on Monday, when these letters will be read by another wave of indignant employees who will write about it in the newsletter.

    Morality:
    • mailman - a dangerous thing
    • Signing without explicit consent is bad form
    • Do not do this on the evening of Friday the 13th.

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