Editing 2822: *@gmail.com
Warning: You are not logged in. Your IP address will be publicly visible if you make any edits. If you log in or create an account, your edits will be attributed to your username, along with other benefits.
The edit can be undone.
Please check the comparison below to verify that this is what you want to do, and then save the changes below to finish undoing the edit.
Latest revision | Your text | ||
Line 10: | Line 10: | ||
==Explanation== | ==Explanation== | ||
+ | {{incomplete|Created by [email protected] - Please change this comment when editing this page. Do NOT delete this tag too soon.}} | ||
+ | A wildcard symbol, such as the asterisk, is not generally usable via email servers, although email ''clients'' may sometimes implement such a function, internally, perhaps to support mailing-list functions (though more commonly this is done via named address-book 'groups'). That said, the asterisk character is a valid one for a mailbox, including group-boxes that might facilitate server-side distribution. | ||
− | + | The address *@gmail.com, as illustrated in the comic, is a proposed feature from Randall that would send an email to ''every'' {{w|Gmail}} user, without having each and every valid Gmail address at hand (manually typed in or via pre-populated email client address books). For obvious reasons, this is not actually a feature, but Randall suggests that if Google ever wanted to shut Gmail down, they could do either do it this way (possibly causing a service-ending overload of resources) ''or'' allow someone this one last boon (as a farewell gift, knowing that there would be relatively few additional repercussions to deal with). | |
− | Reply-all is a sometimes useful feature of email that nonetheless commonly causes headaches and annoyances for both users and administrators. By allowing users to simply reply to everyone copied on the email, it encourages users to do this rather than think carefully about which people their response should be addressed to. This causes lots of users to receive irrelevant emails, and email servers to have to | + | Reply-all is a sometimes useful feature of email that nonetheless commonly causes headaches and annoyances for both users and administrators. By allowing users to simply reply to everyone copied on the email, it encourages users to do this rather than think carefully about which people their response should be addressed to. This causes lots of users to receive irrelevant emails, and email servers to have to store a lot of unnecessary data. Randall's email is essentially designed to induce every Gmail user to email every other Gmail user, generating an unfathomable number of emails. |
− | A recurring phenomenon for email users, especially in the early Internet days of the 1990s and 2000s, was a reply all storm – someone would start a message to a very large group, perhaps hundreds, and even if only 5% of recipients replied to say something like “take me off this list“, a storm of dozens of replies would soon follow. Inevitably, new replies to everyone would start saying things like, “stop Replying All!” If this were done with millions of Gmail users instead of just dozens or hundreds, their result would be apocalyptic | + | A recurring phenomenon for email users, especially in the early Internet days of the 1990s and 2000s, was a reply all storm – someone would start a message to a very large group, perhaps hundreds, and even if only 5% of recipients replied to say something like “take me off this list“, a storm of dozens of replies would soon follow. Inevitably, new replies to everyone would start saying things like, “stop Replying All!” If this were done with millions of Gmail users instead of just dozens or hundreds, their result would be apocalyptic. |
− | + | The title text suggests the possibility of a similar iteration over {{w|Outlook.com}} (formerly Hotmail) and {{w|Yahoo! Mail}} two further well-known mail services with similarly large userbases, but this time attempting to expand the resulting lists within the mail body of the above email, which would make the broadcast message much, ''much'' larger than the simple broadcast 'spam' that the originally illustrated email would be. It's likely this would annoy a few more people then the original message did {{citation needed}}. This also alludes to a occurrence in email chains where a user replies to simply add another user into the chain, which doesn't add much information to the group. | |
− | |||
− | |||
− | |||
− | The title text suggests a | ||
==Transcript== | ==Transcript== | ||
Line 42: | Line 40: | ||
[[Category:Email]] | [[Category:Email]] | ||
− |