scholarz.blog

In my short life I have already done some embarrassing mistakes, but today’s was probably one of the worst. A prime example of how a thoughtless joke, makes its way and comes back as a boomerang.

What happened?

We wanted to implement a beautiful newsletter system which allows us to inform our users comfortably with “scholarz.net” news, but which also allows the user to unsubscribe the newsletter. We don’t want to spam anyone.

Before importing the addresses of our users into the system, we sent a few internal test mails last week. Only to our team, just to check whether the system is working.

We are a good team, we like each other and know the other’s sense of humour, and when joking our tone can get a little rough. Such was also the tone of one of our test mails. Funny among us, but not meant for the public.

So far so good. When the system performed well we imported the user data. No big thing. At least, so we thought…

…because suddenly, we recognised that the system hat started to send last week’s test mails to all imported user addresses.

Nooooo! Stop! Don’t send the rude, informal, internal test mail to all “scholarz.net” users. Panic! Where is the stop button?

When we found it about half of the mails had already been sent. Very embarrassing. An intern joke had become an embarrassing spam mail to many users. And we didn’t want to spam anybody.

Of course, we sent a mail of apology to all users at once, and I would like to take this opportunity to apologise in due form again.

The surprise for our international users was twofold: not only did they receive a weird email. It was also written in German. The platform’s language is English and so are our system mails. But since this was an internal mail, it was in German, and so was the mail of apology.
Some users have complained.
We apologise for this as well. Of course, our platform’s main language is English and we will stick to this.

As it seems, most people take it with humour. Of about 100 answers which I have received so far, 90 had a smiley and a funny comment. Five users were seriously annoyed, five wanted to close their account.

Though this story is embarrassing, I also have to laugh. How stupid!
Well, reminds me of the saying:
“Blessed be those who can laugh about themselves, as they will have much to laugh about.”

In this sense, I hope all of you who have been accidentally spammed can laugh with us and that now one feels hurt or molested.