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State Dept E-mail Crash After "Reply-All" Storm
twistah writes "It seems that a recent 'reply-all storm' at the State Department caused the entire e-mail infrastructure to crash. A notice sent to all State Department employees warned of disciplinary actions which will be taken if users 'reply-all' to lists with a large amount of users. Apparently, the problem was compounded by not only angry replies asking to be taken off the errant list, but by the e-mail recall function, which generated further e-mail traffic. One has to wonder if capacity planning was performed correctly — should an e-mail system be able to handle this type of traffic, or is it an unreasonable task for even the best system?"
Haha, sex change team.
Of the reply all button. Please do not respond with the reply all button. What they need is a reply some button.
I remember my first year of college when I wanted to send Xmas greetings to 'everyone'. I remember, the IT director of the college running from computer lab to computer lab looking for student number xxyz.
Fun times.
What's the M Sex Change Team? People who still haven't gotten over Judi Dench playing M? Come on, folks, M is a title, not a person; it's not a sex change!
Me too!
Shameless plug for my photos on Flickr
Good to know that rigorous competition in the marketplace has totally eliminated misuse of 'reply-all' in the private sector. I look forward to continuing to have a lower life expectancy and higher infant mortality than Canadians and Swedes.
I remember 10 or so years ago a disgruntled employee managed to send a heartfelt "Fuck You" to the entire 27,000+ employees as he was being given the heave ho.
That one tied up the network for some period of time. I always wonder who the bright star was how had composed the distribution list for the entire company directory.
Eh, spelling, grammar, correct configuration of your mail system... who can be bothered with trivial things like those?
The really good thing though is that you are not bitter at all.
This is the sort of thing that listservs seem to do pretty well.
I just wish I could convince more of my users to use them. I have one winner who sends a list using 300+ CC's. The anti-spam system on the mail server slows that list to a crawl (deliberately). They wonder why it takes 3 hours to send, and I tell them to use the list server that we set up, but it's different and they don't want to be bothered. I think I'll make it take 6 hours next time.
Unfortunately, some people don't care. And even worse, they often get angry when you tell them that they mispelled a word.
Don't you mean "they loose there temper when you tell them they misspelled a word?"
There's a perfect xkcd for my sig but I'm too lazy to look it up. sudo someone go find it.
No, this is more like a free ride when you already paid.
That one tied up the network for some period of time.
Thats why I always use qmail for my Fuck You messages.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
I saw a weird variant on that back in university.
One of the engineering departments had a room full of (at the time) fairly high end sun workstations, and these were used both interactively and for people running longer compute jobs overnight.
To facilitate overnight jobs, the admins had set up a round robin dns alias that updated every couple of seconds to point to the machine reporting the lowest load average.
One of the students in my class had the bright idea of "If put 'ssh lowest' in my bashrc file, every time i open a terminal window it'll automatically pick the least loaded machine".
Fast forward a few minutes and we've got 80 sun workstations which have all systematically ssh'd to each other and none of which will accept any new connections...
What like about this post is its calm matter-of-fact delivery... not a hint of anger to be found. Party on Garth!
Just have it send him a notification email that the email he just tried to sent appeared to be spam, and while it was sent successfully he should verify that his system is in fact virus-free. One notification per email sent, of course.
"The term Deltic (meaning in the form of the Greek letter Delta) is used to refer to both the Deltic E.130 opposed-piston high-speed diesel engine designed and produced by D Napier & Son, and the locomotives produced by English Electric using these engines, including their demonstrator locomotive named DELTIC and the production version for British Railways, who designated these as (TOPS) Class 55."
For a train your English is quite good.
Not a Twitter sockpuppet... but I wish I was.
http://www.dilbert.com/strips/comic/2003-04-06/
You have tried to send an email. Do you wish to allow or deny?
93rd rule of Slashdot: No matter how obvious my sarcasm is, my comment will be taken seriously by someone.
And, preemptively, for those who have philosophical objections to me having written the code in the first place, I'll just have to live with your disapproval and hope my steady paycheck somehow sooths my guilty conscience.
Sir, your conscience should enable you to sleep as a baby. This feature alone has provided me with countless hours of entertainment as people suddenly realize the error of their ways as they make bold statements (often of a derogatory nature) in an e-mail which happens to be sent to the wrong person in CC. As they hastily move to send out the recall of their mail only to receive a mail from someone who was offended.
This feature combined with the nature of some people to act before they think has proven quite entertaining indeed. Please enjoy your steady paycheck to its fullest, your code has amused me countless times.
TFA mentioned the use of the recall feature that is only supported by Exchange servers and Outlook.
Of course not :
# cd /var/spool/mail
# rm *
see ? It's all been recalled !
May contain traces of nut.
Made from the freshest electrons.
Sometimes I see comments like this and I'm just stunned. I just want to cry, like that indian in that commercial looking at the litter on the side of the road.