Sent 1000 of the Same Networking Email to 1000 Bankers by Accident (ft. Claude)

This is basically a story from two weeks ago but I’m only sharing it now after the initial panic wore off and the shame settled in, figured I’d turn it into a shit post.

Background: pretty technical kid, CS major at a target-ish non ivy, can actually code. Built out a whole custom system for recruiting instead of doing it manually. Scraped LinkedIn for contacts, cleaned everything, had a legit CRM going w/ notes, tracking, all of it. Felt very on top of things starting early and what not.

So I thought I was being efficient. I didn’t want to be the guy manually sending 200 emails so I got a little carried away.

Used Claude to help draft templates, set up a script to auto fill name / firm / group, then queue emails to send over time so Gmail wouldn’t flag it. Was also dumb enough to let a Python script write directly to my email and hit send on my behalf (don’t reccomend).

I actually did some of it right, spaced it out to like ~40 emails per hour so it looked normal, nothing crazy from a Gmail perspective since there are spam filters and hourly rate limits and things like that. In my head I had this little bot to handle this networking bullshit for me.

I had written like 20 legit emails I actually meant to send that day, real customization, specific people, stuff that made sense for right now.

Then in the code I had a “default” email template sitting there, based on an email I sent to this guy John at JPM that I thought read pretty well.

The logic was basically:
If there’s a custom email for this person, send that.
else, send the default John / JPM email.

Obviously the part I didn’t understand is that “if not” applies to like 900+ people since I hadn’t actually read the code and just let Claude handle all of that (empahsis on I can actually code)

I start it off right, I let it run, watch the first 10ish emails I’d actually intended to send that day go out. They look fine, subject line is what I expect, the custom bodies are there, nothing explodes.

So I assume ok it works and I kind of just let it keep going until it gets through the full 20 emails I had actually written while I go live my life for a few hours.

It doesn’t end up sending every single contact but while I’m away it quietly grinds thru like 5 ish batches of abt 40/hr (exactly 217 total). I come back, open my fucking outbox and it’s a complete fucking shit show disaster.

Everything after those first ~20 real emails is just the John / JPM default. Every email starts w/ “Hi John,”. The body talks abt JPMorgan, “your experience at JPMorgan,” “your team at the firm,” even when the person is at GS, Evercore, random MM, boutique, whatever. I finally scroll thru the subjects and it’s all the same thing line after line:

“Student at some university interested in JP Morgan…”.

So the bot I built basically spent the afternoon slowly pumping out wrong name, wrong firm, identical subject networking spam to bankers I was planning to reach out to months from now. Most of these emails obviously meant to be saved for the fall when recruiting actually ramps, not blasted out randomly right now.

And of course when you send a few hundred emails you’re bound to get a few back. So far around a handful of people have replied w/ stuff like:

“???”
“My name isn’t John and I don’t work at JPM, but otherwise spot on”
“I am confused”
“I appreciate the note but I think you have the wrong email”
“Name - You’re not very good at this, are you.”

personal favorites:
“Hey [my name] – look, that’s great, except for the part where I’m not John and I don’t work at JPMorgan.”
“[my name] – I’m going to show this one to the office lol.”

Which honestly makes sense because anyone bothering to reply to this is either very nice and trying to let me know I screwed up, or just wants to tell me I am a complete idiot.

At that point I’m not even going to bother “debugging” anything, I just killed it. Deleted the code, shut the thing down.

Tbh like real networking hasn’t even properly started and I feel like I’m already fucked and I’m also now in the fun mental space where I imagine this somehow gets back to my school and causes reputational damage but hopefully bankers being bankers are too busy to actually give a shit beyond reading it once and moving on.

On a serious note Please send
1. Prayers
2. If you have advice and after you have made fun of me I would actually appreciate some “constructive criticism” if you will.

Finally, "am I completely cooked or is there any way to recover from this?"