...huh?

I'm sysadmin for a bunch of academic computing space at $Private_University. I get email sent to a bunch of the webmaster@ accounts, like German, or Spanish. The other day I got an email to webmaster@german.$PRIVATE.edu, asking me to take someone off of a mailing list. It included their snail-mail address (on the other side of the continent), so I was a bit puzzled, but we do host a pile of email lists, so I checked. No german lists at all. Hmm. I sent an email to the University mailing list admin, and he looked - one german list, and this person wasn't on it. I sent an email to the administrative assistant for the German department, and she didn't have a clue what the request was about. So I asked the original sender - what web page is this from? I've looked in all of these different places, and nobody has heard of this mailing list.
She wrote me back - it's a paper publication!
I gave up, at that point.