....and so we ended our email with the smarmy remark about machines being incapable of error...never expecting what was about to happen.

The idea seemed simple: change our mailing list announcement from a mailer that took hours to send one at a time to a streamlined listserv that sends the message to everyone at the same time. So we set up the listserv, made a test account, sent ourselves an email...and everything worked just fine. Why didn’t we think of doing this years ago!? So the test account was deleted and the real one set up in the exact same fashion as the test account. The email was sent...wow that was easy!
...
15 minutes later we get another copy of the email. Huh? Oh we must have had our own email in the list twice... 15 minutes pass. Another one and the sign off line is now in triplicate... What the...? This ain't right. So, a call to our server host. Yes, its lunch time, now panic and a 4th email arrives...and the phone calls start. By number 5 we started unsubscribing everyone from the list...not so quick a process as sending an email. By #6 we have contacted our administrators at our server and gave the order to pull the plug. But, not before 7 copies have gone out.

WHY did this happen? Well, like most computer problems, there is an easy one word answer: Microsoft! Specifically, our email program did not recognize that it was sending to a distribution list, so when our mail server sends the success codes to our email client, It doesn't understand them and simply tries to send the message over and over again (without our intervention or knowledge). So we have now run all of the latest updates from Mr. Gates and tested the derned thing for the last day or so.

...so if you subscribe, you will get one copy of our monthly announcement. Also as our small consolation for the multiple emailing, when you subscribe, you will get a link to a special free font made available only to you (this font is not currently for sale nor available from us nor will be in the near future, so it is sort of an exclusive thing). •To subscribe, just send any email to P22list-subscribe@p22.com

In conclusion:

The email was never inteded as a Spam.

It was not a virus. It was not spyware. It was entirely unintentional.

The unsubscribe did not work because we deleted the entire account.

We are sorry. We will not trust machines so readily in the future.