At 5:25 p.m. on the eve of Thursday, February 28, something mystifying occurred on Union University’s campus, something that has only ever been discussed in hushed, reverent tones and only after the student had looked around first to ensure that no one would overhear: a mass email.
The email came from someone who claimed to be named Landen Kemp. Whether or not this person exists, nobody really knows. It was an email claiming that his uncle had just moved into town and was in need of someone to walk his English Bulldog for two hours each day. The pay: $300 a week. In addition to the fact that it sounded too good to be true, things such as this are certainly not a norm on Union’s campus. And yet, the replies began rolling in.
“Yes plz.” “DIBS!” “I am interested.” “Anything to get me out of class.” “I’d walk the dog for $100.” “Will someone walk me? I need it too.” “What kind of dog food doth he prefer?”
Apparently unaware of how mass emails work, countless students earnestly implored the supposed “powers that be” to remove them from the “group.” Of course, this only gave more people the courage to use it as a platform for their snarky comments, mixtape wars, pleas for Cobo swipes, cures for Mesothelioma, invitations to Cardinal Ball, requests for YouTube subscribers, copies of the campus life handbook, scripts of “Shrek” the movie, links to their SoundCloud accounts and memes.
Despite the calm words filled with assurance of an end to this dreaded nightmare: “You can’t remove someone from an email thread, however if you access your email account from a computer you can select ‘ignore’ for this entire thread,” the madness did not stop.
279+ emails, dozens of crashed phones and many tears later, an email was sent out from Jim Avery, the associate vice president for information technology. This email contained a short synopsis of the situation, assurance that IT was working to rectify the problem and bolded instructions: “Please do not forward, reply, or reply all, to the spam email or any of its related emails.”
While still unsure of the source of the attack, Safety & Security did have one lead. About 20 minutes after the initial email was sent out, Joel Holland, a senior Christian studies major, took a selfie with one of his friends sitting in a computer lab in Jennings and posted it on the email thread as a joke. Within just a few minutes, a Safety & Security officer came and asked Holland if he could speak with him in the hallway. Due to the fact that Holland’s face was the only recognizable face in the entire email thread, it made him the main suspect.
Holland assured Safety & Security that he was not the one who mass emailed the entire school.
“It’s a very different experience from being behind the screen to being in front of Safety & Security,” Holland said. “I was having a great time reading it. I even had a friend that was on the way to the hospital and said that the emails and seeing my face really cheered him up.”
Holland and I, wondering why so many people felt comfortable to post so many things out there for the entire school to see, discussed the possibility that nobody thought there would be repercussions from their actions. The email thread moved so quickly that one person’s email didn’t linger long enough for anybody to really react to it.
“This is how clueless everyone was that I was being interrogated,” Holland said.
For anyone in a public gathering place, you had the opportunity to witness the forming of a community due to the emails. Groups of people who had never spoken to each other before were suddenly interacting as though they had always been best friends. With no warning whatsoever, there was an inside joke that the entire student body, including faculty and staff, was in on.
This fact begs the question: Why did something that wasn’t supposed to happen create this kind of community that Union students have thus far failed to create?
The mass email from the underworld may have actually been the mass email from heaven. Thanks to the uncontrollable spam emails, I now have a few more people to nod politely at as we experience a moment of shared knowledge when I pass them in the hallway.
The attack appeared to have been stopped late that night, but on March 4 another mass email was sent to the student body with the subject line “Part time babysitter/Nanny Needed. Pay is $350 weekly.” Much of the information and wording in the email closely resembled that of the first email, and within an hour IT had already sent out emails warning that this was another phishing attempt.
For anyone still wondering how in the world someone was able to get the email addresses of the entire student body, that’s not actually how mass emailing works. Each of our school emails is linked to one email address. When an email is sent to this address it mass emails every address that is linked to it.
Whether you were completely amused by this email thread or it made you want to delete all social media and move to a cave where no one could contact you ever again, the best solution to this issue is to not engage with any of the content within the emails and not to reply.
This was an unintended clutter of all of our email folders, but while we are taking a moment to discuss it, let us appreciate some of the gems it produced:
“This email chain is a sign of the end times.”
“People, this is why communism doesn’t work.”
“I’ll do it for chapel credit.”
“Y’all gone get kidnapped.”
“I like chicken nuggets.”
“Maybe the new cop car will be put to good use.”
“Roses are red violets are blue I hate and spammers too.”
“Look at all those chickens.”
“Fun fact: If you put your bed in a black hole singularity you can sleep without losing time!”
“It’s like a riptide, you just have to ride it out or drown.”
“I was born in 2000 idk what a desktop is!”
