There has been a flurry of activity in the PR corners of a variety of social channels today. These messages have been filled with angst and vile and anger. There has been finger-pointing, name-calling and threats.

What could motivate such an outpouring of emotion? A particularly egregious case of astroturfing? The revelation that a PR agency is behind a front organization for an unethical organization seeking to do evil? An outrageous use of a social channel by a particularly arrogant PR practitioner?

It was none of these things. It was—and I can’t believe I’m writing these words—a reply-all fiasco on an email listserv.

The original email that kicked the whole thing off was no different than the couple dozen pitches I get every day. I was on a list—evidently, a good-sized one—of people with some connection to social media to which a solicitation was blasted. As soon as I saw it, I deleted it. Normally, I wouldn’t name the individual who made the initial mistake, but her name is all over the Internet right now, as evidenced by this very small fragment of tweets on the topic:

The pitch was to review an ebook. The event that led to the downward spiral in this instance was one recipient—an innocent soul named Donna—who responded positively. Incidentally, Donna was smacked down for being too ignorant to know not to respond to a pitch. That, in itself, was way out of line. I don’t like mass pitches any more than anyone else, but if a pitch happens to look like something I, my readers or my clients would be interested in, I reply. There’s nothing wrong with responding to something that genuinely interests you.

So Donna replied. Unfortunately, she appears to have replied to all. There were only two addresses to whom she could have replied. First, there was the PR agent who sent the original mail. Second, there was a single email address that, as it turns out, was a list address. By including the list address, she unwittingly sent her request to everybody who received the first pitch. But without careful examination of that address, Donna could not have known that.

Among those receiving Donna’s request for a copy of the ebook was an anxious author whose new book, “Twitterville,” is due out September 3. (In fact, I’m attending a launch party for the book this weekend.) So, when my friend Shel Israel saw an email in his inbox that said, “Can you send a review copy?” Shel enthusiastically responded and copied the reply to the publicity people promoting his book.

And he evidently also used the “reply all.” There was still was no reason for anybody to suspect these messages were going to a large list of people. Those individual names weren’t showing up in the CC line; it was still just the email address of the list, the original sender (Beth) and the person to whom shel was replying (Donna).

Shortly after that, the torrent began. As soon as I saw what was happening, I took 20 seconds (and not a second more) to create a filter in my email client that redirected all messages containing the same subject line to the trash. If I hadn’t started to see blog posts and tweets on the subject, I never would have noticed another single one of these messages.

Evidently, there are a lot of otherwise smart people in the PR world who don’t know how to deal with a problem that that has cropped up every few months for the last quarter of a century.

But now the fun was beginning. People began invoking “reply all” in order to—you can feel it coming, can’t you?—demand that people stop replying “all.” Each one of these added the individual email address of the message being responded to. And so on. And so on. Each response led to a CC: line crammed with more and more individual email addresses. Each response reflected increasingly hot tempers.

We had unfounded accusations, such as the individual who blamed the whole thing on Shel Israel’s publicist, wrongly believing that it was a promotion for “Twitterville” and not a completely unrelated ebook. Someone from AdAge threatened to name everyone who sent a “reply all” demanding that people stop using “reply all.” (He later reconsidered.) There were those who let everyone else know just how unable they were to control their emotions, like the individual whose message (to “all”) read, “Take me off this fucking list which I never asked to be on and can’t unsubscribe from.”

(To be fair, many of the requests were quite civil—but they still found their way to everyone on the list because they were sent using “reply all.”)

Actually, you could unsubscribe from the list. There was a link at the bottom of the original email, and each subsequent message, that connected to a page where you could unsubscribe. But this led to the next round of emails, as each unsbuscribe notification wound up getting circulated to everyone on the list.

Once again, 20 seconds to create an email filter and I didn’t see any more of these, either. For some people, though, it was easier (and evidently more gratifying) to write, “wtf is going on here? why am I now receiving email support tickets!? unsubscribe me from anything and everything you people are involved with and leave me alone!”

There’s personal branding for you.

The only reason I know how people have been responding is that I have visited my email trash and retrieved all these messages in the wake of the kerfuffle they have produced.

Ten years ago, such a vitriolic response was to be expected. But today? Among a group of people who were on a list in the first place because of their supposed online savvy? And they’re still replying “all” when demanding to be removed from a list??

I sincerely hope these aren’t the same people lamenting how slowly others are embracing social media. If we don’t have the basics down yet, what hope is there for real progress?