What’s being called “an electronic letter bomb” was triggered when an e-mail letter sent to more than 7,000 graduate and undergraduate students Thursday forced recipients to scroll through thousands of names to get to the body of the letter.

Students then began replying to the letter and sending it back to the 7,000 liberal arts and sciences students.

Some students received five or six copies of the same letter, each with a hugely long list of addresses, thus “bombing” the college’s e-mail system.

The original letter, sent by Thomas TenHoeve, the coordinator of classification for the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, was intended to inform students about touch-tone registration for spring.

Most never made it to the actual message.

“I wasn’t really happy about it,” freshman Matt Train said. “The header was so long, by the time you got to the bottom you didn’t even want to read it.”

Elizabeth Revers, a senior in public relations, said she thought the e-mail was a cruel joke.

“I didn’t even read the message, I was just so irritated I just wanted to delete it.”

Mike Bowman, assistant director of the Computation Center, said students compounded the problem when they responded to the e-mail. “Instead of responding to the sender, they responded to the whole list,” Bowman said. “If they have a question about the mail they should interact with the person who sent it.”

The e-mail and its subsequent responses by students caused “serious problems with disk storage on the mail servers,” Computation Center officials said.

If too many characters are used on a person’s account, they can’t receive any more mail until the old mail has been deleted or filed.

Train said he was among those who inadvertently replied to the entire list of students. “I wasn’t really thinking about it.”

J.D. Beatty, assistant dean of the LAS college, said it was the LAS advising center’s idea to send out the e-mail registration notice. Beatty said he thought students would be more likely to check their e-mail than their regular mail.

TenHoeve said he received more then 200 responses, directly and indirectly, from his e-mail. “Most [e-mail] had been pretty nasty,” he said.

He said the whole situation created major difficulties for his office. “It caused a lot of headaches for us, too.”

He said the classification office usually sends out mail flyers to the students informing them of registration.

The office decided to use e-mail to be more effective and to save students money.

TenHoeve said he “received misinformation” from the Computation Center about sending the mass e-mail.

Bowman said there are different ways to address e-mail to people, ways that won’t cause major electronic headaches.