When I was a child I had a recurring nightmare; I would see myself from above, in a maze. My point of view would pull back - like in the film Powers of Ten that they showed in science class at school - until I couldn't see myself any more, and insignificant dot. I would wake up screaming.

But this was different. This nightmare involved my sheer significance. By the end of the day I was hysterical; that so much e-mail was flooding uncontrollably into my mailbox was cause for concern enough, but this was almost every message I had read recently being sent back to me, being sent to dozens of other people, who in turn sent me e-mails complaining about my e-mails. I only had to read some of their e-mails to generate even more. This electronic mail beast was spawning more and more mail, and I wondered if it would ever stop.

You see, I had joined a mailing list. No big deal. I'd been on dozens of mailing lists before, without much hassle. Signing off some of them had posed a problem, but I had never experienced anything that spiralled out of control so rapidly.

It was all down to my e-mail program, and its habit of requesting a receipt or confirmation that any message I sent had actually arrived at its destination. In the place where I work this is a popular feature - you can see when Joe Shmoe in the Finance department has read your e-mail. You know he's at his desk. You know he can't deny he saw your message. When it comes to sending such mail outside the Unfeasably Huge Corporation where I work, I sometimes get messages back to say my e-mail has arrived at some old node or other. It's quite comforting - little signals back from the Voyager probe of mail I launched on an uncertain journey through info-space. Even when I posted things to mailing lists, I would get messages back automatically from the subscribers whose systems were configured to respond.

Not so with the Brass Eye list... when the messages I posted to the list were read by folk with similar e-mail programs to mine, their e-mail programs sent receipts back to the list, which instead of mailing the receipts back to me, mailed them to everyone on the list. I started getting e-mail asking why my messages were appearing more than once. Then my e-mail program responded by informing everyone on the list every time I read a certified message.

A thread was named after me. Battles were fought and lost on my behalf. The owner of the list pleaded with people to be nice to me, to no avail.

"Please do not be abusive to Anthony the Receipt-meister. It is not his fault that his mail-package has fascistic tendencies. He is working for a tiny little company who aren't quite sure how their IT stuff works. We are trying to sort the stuff out, and if there is no solution by the end of the day, he will be slinking sadly off the list.

But I couldn't hack it anymore - most of the traffic on the list now revolved around me and my e-mail program. So I unsubscribed. And my attempt to unsubscribe failed. My e-mail address had, as is its wont, mutated into something very weird indeed. I had to beg the list owner to remove me manually... so it's lucky I happened to know who the owner was and how to get hold of him...

"It's getting doubly surreal! I just unsubscribed you because of your mutilated return address (which means the server doesn't know that you are you (if you know what I mean).

All of which was a terrible pity... as it was the most (intentionally) amusing and entertaining list I'd ever found. Now my mailbox is empty, and I can see those childhood nightmares of insigificance starting all over again...

(Since this article was written, the Brass Eye mailing list has been modified, and incidents such as the ones described above just don't happen any more!)