Mailing lists are dangerous things. Especially when you’re the admin of them.

I run one for a list of about 100 members in one of my clubs. The other is a list of board members for a second club, which has about 10 members. To start, I set Kyle’s Blackberry address up as a “moderator,” intending to whitelist him for sending to the list. In actuality, moderator status means that he receives an e-mail every time a member is added or removed from the list. And I proceeded to do a bulk-addition of all 100 addresses, which resulted in the server simultaneously sending him 100 electronic missives, which apparently caused the phone to “buzz like an angry hornet” before crashing.

Just now, I got the two lists confused. Fortunately, I did it the less dangerous way: sending an announcement meant for the 100 people to the 10-member board of the other club, all of which are good friends of mine who expect me to do dumb things like that. It would have been much worse had I instead sent some sort of sensitive material to a list of 100 people I hardly know, expecting to send it to the list of 10.