Katelyn Brown browsed her email the morning of Feb. 24, like she did everyday. After replying to one of her professors, she immediately received about 35 notifications.
Brown realized, with shock and embarrassment, that she’d accidentally created a email chain with 4,300 OU students and faculty through Outlook.
Brown, a health and exercise science sophomore, is currently enrolled in OU’s pre-medicine program, which requires students to volunteer a certain number of hours.
She was applying to Lighthouse Medical Clinic, which requires a recommendation letter stating she was in good academic standing. This led her to email her former Chinese professor, Yanrong Qi.
It was the type of exchange countless students make with professors across campus each year. A request, an agreement, a few clarifying questions and on with each other’s day.
Brown started with an email on Feb. 23 asking Qi to write a short letter vouching for her academic integrity. Qi replied the same day that she would be happy to do so and asked for guidelines for writing the letter.
The next day, Brown followed up to tell Qi to send the letter straight to her, not the clinic she was applying to. Brown didn’t even look away for a minute before receiving a storm of reply notifications.
“Immediately, I got 40 emails, and it was a bunch of random people being like, ‘Wrong person,’” Brown said. “I was like, ‘That’s weird.’”
Brown had somehow sent an email to Contour on Campus instead of her professor.
Contour is a streaming service from Cox, which OU Housing and Food Services formerly offered to students who lived on campus. The distribution list, managed by OU Housing and Food Services, is no longer in use, according to OU Information Technology.
“This address was initially set up and managed by Housing and Food Services to provide Cox Contour services to on-campus residents,” Stephen Ho, an OU Information Technology strategist wrote in an email.
Many of the replies to Brown’s accidental email to the distribution list at first stated they were accidentally included, but they soon became comic.
Keane Hauck, a psychology junior, saw the email chain shortly after it started on Feb. 24. He replied to the chain with, “Hey guys, what’s up,” but his message got blocked by Microsoft Office’s Reply All Storm Protection.
“The conversation is too busy with too many people,” the automated email read.
If 10 reply-all emails are sent to over 5,000 recipients within 60 minutes, also known as a "reply all storm," Microsoft Office will block messages for the next four hours.
“On Friday, 2/24/22, the email distribution list contour@ou.edu was inadvertently included in a user email intended for someone else, resulting in the unintended email distribution,” Ho wrote.
After the notifications went out, Brown’s friends began calling her.
“Five of my friends called me, and they (said), ‘Did you email 4,000 people?’ and I was like, ‘Maybe? It’s possible,’” Brown said.
She sent an email back to the chain, apologizing and wishing everybody a good day.
“That was me taking ownership and signing off,” Brown said.
Brown also emailed Qi, apologizing for all the notifications.
Later that day, Hauck and his friend Aidan Sudler, a physics and piano senior, discussed the email thread.
The pair noticed Brown’s email had been sent to Contour On Campus and wondered if the address was the cause of the mass email chain.
“I was like, ‘OK, this is pretty evidently an email group all of these students are a part of,’” Hauck said. “‘I wonder if it is as easy as sending an email to Contour on Campus that then all of these students will simultaneously receive (an email).’”
On a whim, he drafted an email.
“Hey y'all, don’t forget to be voting for aidan sudler/keane hauck for OU student body president next year!!” the email read.
The email was part of an inside joke.
“We have always had this running joke in between the two of us,” Hauck said. “When we’re seniors, we’ll run for (student government) president, and our platform will be: We are going to build a zip line from the Physical Science Center to Lindsey that all OU students can use for transportation.”
He hit send, not thinking it would work.
“Then the texts start rolling in,” Hauck said. “Oh no, what have I just done?”
Over 4,000 students, staff and faculty in the chain were emailed again as Hauck correctly surmised a flaw in the OU Outlook system.
What was a joking afterthought soon became a bit more serious, Hauck said.
Replies ranged from annoyed to humorous. Some recipients said they would vote for or against them, one wanted everyone who’d received the email to report to the drinking game “power hour” in what might have been a response to the numerous requests to go to Logie’s later that night from Brown’s email chain.
“(The replies) were cracking me up,” Hauck said.
Not everyone was laughing, though.
“I did get in trouble from faculty,” Hauck said. “(A dean said), ‘Hey Keane, please delete this email, if possible, and take steps to make sure this never happens again.’”
Hauck was surprised he didn’t receive more emails via Contour on Campus. About 35 people responded to Brown’s original email, and 15 people responded to his.
“I’m surprised that more people weren’t sending emails because it was so easy for me to do it,” Hauck said. “Once I got home and I told my roommates about it, they were like, ‘Dude, that is so funny, I am going to send one right now.’”
This email chain isn't the only time this has happened before. One incident in 2016 involving a phishing scam was reported by OU Daily.
A phishing email was sent to several hundred OU students and faculty. A few hours after it was sent, it became a casual group email chain containing 135 emails.
People replied with memes and selfies, and a group message called “Spam Fam 2016” was created from the chain.
However, Brown’s email chain was created from overlooked email distribution list restrictions, not spam.
“Typically, larger distribution lists are set with strict user-based sending permissions,” Ho wrote in an email. “In this instance, permissions allowed users to send and reply directly to contour@ou.edu, creating multiple unsolicited ‘unsubscribe’ and related requests to all users on the list.”
OU IT was able to end the chain the same day Brown and Hauck sent the emails.
Brown and Hauck have since moved on from their bit of fame. Now that thousands of students have virtually met him, Hauck wondered if it was time to launch an actual Student Government Association campaign.
“We might run for presidency,” Hauck said. “Honestly, since the email, we’ve been discussing it a little more seriously if we put together a campaign as a joke, I mean, just to see.”
Perhaps they could merge their claims to fame — email chain and zip line — for the speed with which they’d tackle issues around campus.
For Brown’s part, she holds no aspirations of higher office, much less campus notoriety.
“It was funny. It was a little embarrassing at first, then I was like, ‘No one knows who I am, it’s not an embarrassing email, everybody’s sending funny responses, except a couple of people were really upset cause they were getting 50 emails,’” Brown said. “Other than that, it wasn’t a big deal.”
She loved reading through the replies, finding them comical and entertaining.
“Sent to 4300 people that’s crazy,” one replier wrote.
“Best of luck though!” another wrote.
Brown later found a post from @ouloveletters on Instagram that referenced the email chain.
“maybe my true love is in the 4000-person friday morning email chain,” the post read.
Some may be able to find a deeper meaning, but perhaps one simple reply was what most recipients thought: “Lmao.”
This story was edited by Alexia Aston, Karoline Leonard and Jazz Wolfe. Francisco Gutierrez copy edited this story.
