News service makes headlines with accidental spam attack

On Friday InformIT.com, a subsidiary of publisher Pearson Education, sent an internal test of an offer for users to sign up to its daily Oracle newsletter. Unfortunately the now red-faced news service accidentally sent the email to its entire customer promotions list.

The simple mistake was compounded after InformIT.com forgot the basic protocol which prevents users returning reply emails to the entire list.

The email, with its brief message hows this looking Steve?, created bedlam as replies from recipients asking for more information or to be unsubscribed were inadvertently sent to everyone else on the list.

One customer, Jon Scriven, IT manager at real estate company Hemingway, returned after the weekend to find the firm's mail servers had ground to a halt.

"I initially thought we'd had a virus attack, only none of the emails had attachments. Then I thought it might be a DoS [denial of service] attack. Only once I started to look at the emails did I realise that it was a good old-fashioned human error," Scriven told silicon.com.

Alan Cohn, director of IT operations for InformIT, blamed the mistake on an administrative error in the company's new emailing system. He said: "We understand we caused a problem, and we moved to correct the problems as soon as we could."

Cohn was unwilling to reveal how many emails have been sent, but said the users were all from a registered list owned by the company. InformIT has now reconfigured its list.