N.C. Government anti-tax spam

Government lawmakers in North Carolina were recently hit by a massive volume of anti-tax spam:

An e-mail message to members of the General Assembly designed to publicize an anti-tax sentiment and promote cuts in government spending seems to have missed its mark.

Instead, the e-mail ignited protests from North Carolina legislators and staffers as the unsolicited e-mail was repeatedly duplicated through internal settings and automatically forwarded to other staffers and aides.

The volume of about 450,000 messages nearly overloaded the General Assembly's e-mail system.

The North Carolina branch of Americans for Prosperity, a Washington-based special interest group, set up a Web site that generates e-mail messages to state legislators automatically with the push of a button.

A legislature spokesman said officials are working with the group to find a way to deal with the problem.

Sounds like a bug in the software there somewhere (or what someone is claiming), but even after reading that a few times, I am not entirely clear what happened there.