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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?"
Dear state department
I'm sorry to hear about your recent trouble
There is a brand new invention on the internet which have the ability to ease the strain on your mailservers. it is called maillist managers. one is called mailman and can be found at: http://www.gnu.org/software/mailman
There are several others, some free, and some non free, but they exist for most server platforms. If you don't have the expertice in house to set it up corrctly, you can get any number of consultancy companies to help you out.
Yours faithfull
Almost anonymous coward
OpenNet, by a very quick look on google, seem to be their network name for the non-classified bits and pieces. Supposedly Microsoft + Cisco stuff.
Feel free to disagree, but please provide a URL reference to the OpenNet email server software vendor if doing so.. ;-)
yes its exchange internally
openNet is what they brand it as
feel free to correct me with evidance that it was not the case any more but I know 2 exchange servers there and this say's otherwise
exchange has the recall ability and so does lotus notes
most other servers do not have this feature for very good reasons l
regards
John Jones
www.johnjones.me.uk my blog about email and digital communication
So he can just append a line to his users' .mozilla/thunderbird/chrome/userChrome.css and all works well.
Having been a witness to the incident in question, here's what happened:
1) Around December 30th a blank e-mail (with receipt request) went out to almost all users. Apparently it was from a single user with some malware etc. (we didn't get any further details).
2) The next day, the same blank message was sent out again (from the same user).
3) As people came back from vacations, we got a few "Please remove me from this list", and "What is this message" send as reply-all.
4) Then, followed with a bunch of "Me Too".
5) Then, a bunch of "Please, don't reply all" (sent, of course, reply-all).
6) Followed by a bunch of "remove me from this list".
and so on, and so forth, with no end in sight...
The initial message didn't have any virus or other "payload"; just a blank message that caused a bunch of confusion. The whole incident was actually pretty hilarious to watch.
Message recall. Oh dear.
Years ago, I wrote the bulk of this feature. It is not an Exchange feature, but an Outlook feature. It works by sending a custom MAPI message that Outlook recognizes and processes. Of course, this only works if all recipients are using Outlook. It also, after we did some usability testing, only deletes unread email, or email that has not been moved to a subfolder (the original version was quite determined and would hunt down and kill the message even if it had been moved to a subfolder, renamed or entered the email protection program). In this way, it did not violate the UI dictum that the computer move things around when you haven't given it instructions to do so.
So yes, it is Outlook only. If sent to a non-Microsoft mail system, it degrades to a simple notification that the message is being recalled. And it does not a good choice for getting rid of flames you shouldn't have been sending. But within its expected use as a feature - correcting mistakes in email that should have been caught before pressing send, it works fairly well.
But because it is client based, rather than an Exchange feature, it does cause a new mail message to be sent to each original recipient and, combined with a send-all storm, could greatly exacerbate things.
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.