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A comment on GitHub user sends notification to 400k users. Parent comment

Re:GitHub user sends notification to 400k users by al_borland on Sunday June 05, 2022 @02:52AM (#31628671)
Free Code Camp had a bug in their email notification system several years back. I suspect they weren’t incrementing the index in their loop… Since I was the first person in the email list, I got an email for every person in their list. I had to shut my phone off, as the notifications were going out of control and couldn’t keep up.

Fun fact, Gmail caps threads at 100 messages. So I had a full page of 100 email long threads in gmail on my phone.

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Re:GitHub user sends notification to 400k users by matsemann on Sunday June 05, 2022 @03:54AM (#31628903)
I did that exact bug once. But I didn't just get one email for each subscriber, since the index didn't increase the loop never terminated. Took me some time to actually kill the process (PHP script running at some provider back in the day). Got over a 100k emails to my Gmail, so much that my account crashed and it took a few days before I managed to log in again (got an error saying something went wrong when opening gmail in the browser). So at least then it was very possible to ddos someone's mailbox.
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Re:GitHub user sends notification to 400k users by sureglymop on Sunday June 05, 2022 @03:10AM (#31628734)
That's terrifying.. did the notifications make your phone unusable? DOSed by FreeCodeCamp...
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Re:GitHub user sends notification to 400k users by al_borland on Sunday June 05, 2022 @01:20PM (#31632949)
Yeah, pretty much. I forcefully shut my phone off, as I was unable to just get to the settings, and then was trying to DM the guy via Twitter to try and get it to stop. Eventually it did stop and he reached out to tell me what went wrong.
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