The Story of a Runaway Email Chain

By Andrew Nogay
Web Content Assistant

On Monday while most Texas State students, or at least me, were celebrating the upcoming school year by being in the fetal position, an email chain encompassed entire majors’ inboxes. It was absolutely crazy. A first hand account of it, as it was happening, can be seen in the Texas State subreddit.

“Someone emailed the ENTIRE science majors email group asking how to set up an advising appointment. Then people started to reply all saying they wanted to be removed from that emailing list. People then began replying all telling the first group of people to stop replying. A third group contributed to the chaos by ironically pointing out that everyone replying all is causing the problems they are complaining about. So now I’m sitting here with over a hundred emails from what are supposed to fairly smart people, who in this instance could not figure out how to change the cc in an email.

I just don’t know why. Why has it come to this?”

The question of why can never be truly answered. However, it does provide a fair amount of banter. So far, the post on the Texas State subreddit is already one of the most commented posts in the history of a discussion board that’s been around for four years.

“I’m not sure exactly what happened,” said Hunter Robb, a construction science major. “It was extremely annoying and everyone in my first class talked about it…I don’t know if it was preventable. But I think everyone got [more than] 400 emails.

Maybe the whole situation says something about people’s tendencies to be unaware of themselves, or cause annoyance to others, or the want to correct an error. Maybe it’s a little bit of all three. Either way, the reaction to it has been strong.

“People started trolling on there, it was hilarious,” said Alex Macy, a mechanical engineering major. “It was fun for a day. Any longer, and it would’ve been too much. Like if it kept waking me up [on Tuesday] then I would’ve been annoyed. But I enjoyed it.”

Personally, I love this story. As a third party who was not involved with the email chain, the anarchy that came from it is absolutely delicious. Nobody knew why it was happening, how to stop it, or why people kept on adding to it. It was the last day before school started, might as well have something strange occur.