BBC stumbles on email list

The BBC has suspended its London Travel email list after mistakes were made which led anyone trying to unsubscribe from the service sending their email address to everyone on the list. The service was reactivated last week but has now been suspended. Annoyed subscribers found they were receiving all unsubscribe requests. The …

[Anonymous Coward]

Been there, done it, have the t-shirt

These things happen, I have done it 3 times this year after;

1. Having a new newsletter system coded. In tests it worked fine but when I used it for my subscriber list it sent to all my unsubscribes and addressed every email to the first person on the list. Was rather embarrassing.

2. Had the systems redone and tested yet again. This time when I did it for real it emailed as an attachment, the entire subscriber list. To quote one unhappy person "Thanks for letting everyone know my email address, really appreciated"

3. Ticked the merge box. Now I emailed my unsubscribers, my subscribers, and ALL my clients.

A lesson learned........ Test, test and test again. However, sometimes these things happen and even though large companies get held accountable more so than us smaller ones, everyone makes mistakes ;-)

OK - posted anonymous for obvious reasons and please. FLAME ME all you like ;-)

[Anonymous Coward]

Nothing New

I had my email address sent out to 230 people and all their addresses sent to me thanks to the BBC Radio London Tony Blackburn newsletter (oh shut up, I am not). Better yet, the idiot responsible for it (Tony's producer) sent a second email with all the addresses in it trying to 'cancel' the first one.

I got a few unsolicited private emails as a result of that, though none of a sexual nature (more's the pity), but I've found out since then that this already happened twice on a BBC 6 Music mailing list.

I'm subscribed to a few commercial radio stations' mailing lists and this has never happened with them. It seems the mighty BBC has a long habit of sharing listeners' email addresses through their mailing lists and show no signs of letting up, thanks to the unique way it's funded (ie, the money's always there so who gives a f*** whether we do a good job or not)

Still, I now know how to get in touch with the other 229 Tony Blackburn fans, so that's something of a silver lining, though having said that an awful lot of the subscribers had BBC email addresses, including Michael Grade! I wonder if he updated his address when he moved to ITV?

[David]

To the anonymous posting...

3 times in a year?

You say: "In tests it worked fine"

What kind of tests were you doing?

It's not about the number of tests, but what you are actually testing!

[Anonymous Coward]

not just the bbc

everyone does this.

my last company was in the record industry.

i once received a newsletter from one of the majors with all the email addresses of their other 'partners'... i.e. all our competitors.

it was quite useful to see who else they were working with.

the problem is computer interfaces don't give you a sense of impact... seeing a thousand copies of your subscriber list in print might ring a few alarm bells. but pressing 'ok' on a dialog box you don't really understand...?

[Graham Dawson]

The obvious solution?

"the problem is computer interfaces don't give you a sense of impact..."

The obvious solution to this is to have the computer fitted with a large comical boxing glove, then every time an error message pops up it should punch the user in the face. Hard. Repeatedly. Eventually they'll stop using it and stop causing the errors.

[Joe]

What?!

It's really not that hard to employ a competent programmer.

I knocked up a mailing list using PHP and MySQL for a band I'm involved with, and we haven't had any problems even approaching the magnitude of these ones (yet..!)

If anyone for the BBC is reading this, I'll sell you it for the right price ;)

[Pascal Monett]

If that happens in a bank

Someone gets fired. You know, privacy, accountability and all those quaint things.

Betcha if the CEO's email went out the issue would be solved real quick !

[Anonymous Coward]

It isn't that hard... is it?

The problems being reported look like an amateur was put in charge of both development and testing. It really is not that difficult, as long as you take your user's best interests seriously.

Test 1, (the me me me approach)

Run the app and see if it can handle 100k users without crashing the server.

Test 2, (the we take our users seriously approach).

Run the app and see what it sends, who it sends it to, and when it sends it

I know how difficult it is, I have developed a subscription/mailing system myself.

Now, I am being made redundant in 3 months time and have a huge database of email addresses and user profiles...... Hmmm, security is a multi faceted thing.

[Alan Davies]

Title

Does no-one use the BCC field anymore?

[Matt]

Misread that

@Alan

I misread your comment of "Does no-one use the BCC field anymore?" as "Does no-one use the BBC field anymore?"

Now there's a thought, a field that the BBC could use to indicate that there were potentially a whole lot of problems just around the corner! Nice.

[Anonymous Coward]

Specially woven mailing list software

I actually wonder if half of these mailing lists really are run using special programs or scripts, or if a radio producer doesn't simply copy & paste a list of email addresses into the BCC field of a normal email, and sometimes they forget and either paste into the To or CC field by mistake? Lets face it, it's pretty much the culture in radio to lie about things being all fancy when really it's all held together by cellotape. Doctor Fox's jukebox (Earths most powerful music machine in its day, apparently) was in reality a teenage runner being sent to fetch CDs whenever the producer prodded them. So do todays producers even know what a mailing list is? Do they think it's simply a term to describe mass mailing people from the BCC field? (or at least trying to)