Campus temporarily suspends email list service

3:30 P.M. 10/28 UPDATE: The service is coming back online, although the lists.ucdavis.edu website remains unavailable for now.

Information and Educational Technology temporarily suspended the main UC Davis email list service this morning after an email message, sent to hundreds of public email lists Tuesday evening, flooded UC Davis email accounts with tens of thousands of unwanted, duplicate messages.

During the suspension, email lists supported by Sympa--which includes lists for groups ranging from the Asian American Association to Rec Pool swim instructors--did not send any messages. Once the service is restored, people across campus will receive a backlog of messages from the email lists they subscribe to.

Subscribers should not see more copies of the message promoting former President Bill Clinton's visit to campus this Wednesday. IET email service administrators have cleared out more than 32,000 copies of this message from the queues on Sympa, and are tagging the message with a spam score that will cause further duplicate transmissions of it to be rejected by campus filters.

The mailing, which did not follow campus procedures for sending mass email messages, caused mail loops within automated incident-response ticketing systems, a rash of unsubscribe requests from individuals using the reply-all response function, and a general level of confusion on many of the affected lists this morning.

The campus will restore the Sympa email list service as soon as it can. For service updates, please see the campus status page. Please direct any questions to the IT Express Service Desk at 530-754-HELP (4357).