Last Spring, we created a mailing list for ticket exchange,
dbr-tickets, for Duke fans to find basketball tickets to games.
Since it was near the end of the season, there was no traffic.
With the new season about to begin, we decided to clean up the list
of mail addresses that are no longer valid.
Unfortunately, some people had forgotten they had subscribed to this
list, and were confused by the email. They responded to the list.
We quickly reset the list so that replies were sent only to the
sender of the message, but any mailer with a reply-to-all capability
will easily circumvent that. This resulted in the list subscribers
receiving many messages.
Clearly, this is not acceptable, but it became a situation where
one is trying to get the djini back into the bottle. We thought
we had made progress on this. Instructions on how to unsubscribe
were posted to the list, and anyone asking to be removed from the
list was removed.
Two incidents last night convinced us otherwise. The first was
some abusive mail sent to James. The second was a mail bombing.
Both incidents were reported to the perpetrators ISP, and the latter
was reported to the police.
It became obvious last night that the only solution to the problem
was to shut down the list. Consequently, last night the list was
deleted from the DBR mail server. The software under My DBR will
be updated to remove reference to that list today.
We're sorry about the problems that this has caused you, and request
your forgiveness for our mistakes in this matter.