Step aside Mayan Apocalypse 2012, OU’s reply allmageddon is here. 

So far, over 300 spam emails have been sent out to the entire undergrad class. Keep in mind, the undergrad class is comprised of 15,655 students according to the OU website.

This malicious mailstrom began when a WRT 160 student emailed a survey to all undergrads, Sunday, March 9, at around 8:30 p.m. 

It is currently unknown how the student acquired access to this mailing list in particular, because it is not posted on OU’s public mailing lists website found here.

All was fine and dandy at first. However, the student made one mistake with her email– she left the option open to reply all.

Within minutes, the first responses began. Soon after, other members of OU’s undergrad class caught on and began to troll their fellow Golden Grizzlies with photos, gifs, videos and memes.

Dominic Dabish was the first student to hit reply all.

“I just thought it was so strange how a student thought it was so important to email all 20,000+ students of Oakland University for a WRT 160 survey,” Dabish said. “I kind of had a feeling that an OU reply-to-all thread had the potential to be pretty fun, but it got way crazier than I could have imagined.”

Some notable entries in the reply allmageddon include: a request to follow a dog on Instagram, gifs of a woman being hit in the face with hot dogs, a letter from a Nigerian prince, numerous Rick Rolls, an offer for a used microwave, multiple statements about turtles and videos about how mushrooms can save the world.

Throughout the night, numerous students pleaded to be taken off the email list and urged their fellow undergrads to stop commenting.

Some offered advice on how to mute the conversation. Others offered links claiming they would help one unsubscribe, but were actually sending videos of Rick Astley’s ‘Never Gonna Give You Up’ in disguise.

Eventually, University Technology Services was brought in to help solve the dilemma.

“We forwarded all of the issues to the list owner and they took care of it,” said Theresa Rowe, Chief Information Officer of UTS.

The list owner is the OU Registrar’s office. The registrar, Steve Shablin, declined to comment on the situation.

The student who originally sent the email declined to comment as well.

OU’s media relations released a statement:

“An all undergraduate email list was accessed at Oakland University over the weekend. A student used the list to try and get other students to participate in an online survey for a class project. From there, several ‘reply all’ emails went back and forth among students using that function of the email.

We are now looking at necessary changes to our email policies and guidelines to prevent this situation from happening in the future.”

The Oakland Post will continue to update as more information becomes available.

If you would like to speak about the great mailstrom of 2014, leave a comment or send an email to [email protected]