Mailing List spam At first I marvelled at the naivete of some of my fellow students. Then I thought of giving them the benefit of the doubt – surely one can't expect that everyone knows or is familiar with the concept of a mailing list. But if you have the minimum requirements to gain entry to study an engineering degree, surely you can read?

Dozens of message variants reading similar to “who R u?” and “what's this about?” were answered by this message:

You received an email with the subject "Welcome to list MailingList" . In this email there is a notification about joining the mailing list and your login info.

Everyone on the list will receive an email from anyone sending a mail to the mailing list.

If you wish to unsubscribe go here ...

Messages similar to this one were posted on no less than 3 occasions by other users to the new (badly managed) list. There was even a case were someone posted an explanation to the above message for some users, and yet the ignorant remained ignorant. One guy even posted

e fotshek i dont know u and i have never send u any messages, u dont wanna fuck with, im gonna kill u.kgothatso deman

after 60 messages have already been sent to the list. One whose subject is “This is what's going on.” I hope he can put his money where his mouth is, because he signed his name to a death threat visible to the whole engineering group at the university.

The ignorance of the students, however, is less troubling than the idiocy of the moderators. Who creates a list for 2000+ students and gives them all permission to post to it?

I suppose I could thank them... It was a highly entertaining start to the week.  ¶ 10:42