Google says Sorry for Spamming CR-48 Notebook Owners

Yesterday Techcrunch reported that CR-48 Notebook owners were besieged with a flood of Google Group Spam. There were 100+ emails sent between 12.55am and 1.15 am PT

My husband is part of a select group of alpha testers that received the Notebook earlier this year. He was also a recipient of the emails that were sent out by Google last night. The situation was bemusing but also a little confusing.

Some of the messages contained the F*bomb as some irate users were woken up in the middle of the night.

Today Google sent out an apology to a potential 60,000 Google CR-48 Notebook owners.

The apology message explains in detail what went wrong:

From: Chrome Notebook Team
Date: Sat, Feb 12, 2011 at 6:21 PM
Subject: Apologies and an update on the Chrome Notebook Pilot User Forum

Earlier this morning, you may have received a large number of emails from chrome-notebook-pilot-users@googlegroups.com regarding the Chrome notebook Pilot program user forum. We apologize for this inconvenience, and you will not receive any more messages from this address. Instructions for deleting these messages are at the end of this email.

What happened? We planned to launch our Chrome Notebook Pilot forum next week to all users who had been selected for the Pilot program. Last night, around midnight Pacific time, a user discovered this forum and posted a message. Unfortunately, we had misconfigured this forum to email every post to every member. Thus, the first post started an avalanche of responses. Some messages were unsubscribe requests, others were thoughtful comments or questions, but all of them were emailed to every user. We have since deleted this group.

We’ve created a brand new user forum, which you can sign up for here:

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/chrome-notebook-pilot

Rest assured: you will not be added to this forum unless you sign up using the link above.

The goal of the forum is to provide a centralized place for Pilot users to share their Chrome notebook experiences and tips. In addition, with a centralized forum, our team can more effectively respond to your questions and feedback.

If you are receiving this email and have not yet received a Cr-48, you should be hearing from us soon. Again, our apologies for the flood of emails, and we hope you will join us at the new forum.

Chrome Notebook Team

—-
How to delete previous messages:

Gmail

1. In the Gmail search box, type “from:chrome-notebook-pilot-users” and press Enter.
2. Click the checkbox to the left of the Archive button to Select All.
3. At the top of the search results, click the link that says “Select all XX conversations in Search results.”
4. Click the Delete button. You should not receive any more messages from this address.

Other email programs
1. Use the search function in your email program to find messages with the sender chrome-notebook-pilot-users@googlegroups.com.
2. Select all the messages in the search results.

3. Delete the messages. You should not receive any more messages from this address.