Back in the ARPANET days, the convention was that if you wanted to be removed from a mailing list info-foo@mit-mc, you sent email to info-foo-REQUEST@mit-mc to

Back in the ARPANET days, the convention was that if you wanted to be removed from a mailing list info-foo@mit-mc, you sent email to info-foo-REQUEST@mit-mc to contact the maintainer of the mailing list, instead of broadcasting a "please remove me" message to the entire mailing list. Of course there were people who didn't know the convention, and would violate this rule of netiquette. So a mischievous hacker who got sick of all the people asking "please remove me" set up a special mailing list called "please-remove-me@mit-mc" just for them, to which he subscribed people who didn't know the convention, so they could all talk to each other about how to remove themselves from mailing lists.