Sam here –

many of you have probably received thousands of GDP emails over the last 24 hours. Due to a technical issue with WordPress’s Newsletter feature, newly migrated posts triggered emails to subscribers – which means that when we moved over all 6000 posts from the old site to preserve them, each of them triggered an email.

First off, I apologize for the nuisance and inconvenience caused by the email flood; I know waking up to find thousands of emails in your inbox is extremely inconvenient.

I’m including instructions below for how to delete the emails for Gmail and Outlook – I’m also in the process of working with support to unsend the emails, if possible, and prevent any more old posts emails from being sent out.

Again, I apologize, and I hope this doesn’t dampen your enthusiasm for Greensboro Daily Photo’s work. I took on this migration project because I believe in what they do; no technical leap is without its quirks, and while this was a big one, I’d like to ask for forgiveness on their behalf for this Halloween scare, in light of their 17 years work documenting and archiving the city we live in and love.

Gmail Users

For Gmail, search for Greensboro Daily Photo in the top bar. Then, sort the emails by “Most recent”, and click the “Select All” checkbox to the left of the emails.

A message should appear prompting you to select all emails matching the search. Click on that option, and then proceed to delete the emails. The process may take several minutes, but will clear out all of the emails.

Outlook Users

For Outlook, the process is similar – search for “Greensboro Daily Photo”, and then click the checkbox under “All” to select all matching emails, and then click the trash icon to remove them.

Current Update (10/31 9:52am)

No further emails should be sending, and I’m working with WordPress support to see whether they can retract the emails, to save subscribers the work of purging the emails. I will post more updates here as the situation develops.