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?"

Comments

Exchange, huh?

[mikelieman]

*Can* one adequately capacity plan for that hunk of crap?

Re:Exchange, huh?

[Anonymous Coward]

Jesus-fucking-Christ. Do you have difficulty in life being a complete idiot. OpenNet is an exchange based system. Maybe if you had taken 30 seconds to do even a trivial amount of research you would know that. OpenNet is a name the State Department gave the system to make it easier to keep the classified system separate from the unclassified system. Instead you decided to post total BS and waste all our time with your lies.

Do us all a favor and try to have some idea of what your talking about the next time you open your mouth.

And in other news...

[cthulu_mt]

The government does a task less adequately than private enterprise.

I look forward to them managing my health care.

Re:And in other news...

[larry bagina]

And you might want to remember that the current financial and industrial collapse was given to us by the finest and most highly educated examples of stupid, greedy, incompetent, short sighted, overpaid, negligent, and possibly criminal congress.

Fixed that for you.

Re:And in other news...

[Siffy]

You're suggesting that Congress somehow forced private enterprise to behave stupidly, greedily, incompetently, negligently and possibly criminally? That private enterprise was unable to resist and followed each other, like lemmings, over the cliff?

Yes, see Housing and Community Development Act of 1977 - Title VIII (Community Reinvestment Act) and Federal Housing Enterprises Financial Safety and Soundness Act of 1992 which forced Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to do what they did to those poor poor people.

A huge problem is that the thing which surprises us most about politicians is not that they're whores, but that they're cheap whores. Many seem perfectly willing to sell out their constituents, the country, and the constitution for relatively small campaign donations. I might be able to understand an expensive whore of a politician accepting payment of hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars in exchange for extending some favor. But the politician who takes a few thousand dollars in exchange for letting make millions or even billions of dollars be made at the ultimate expense of the rest of us is a cheap whore.

See Rod Blagojevich for what happens when they get greedy.

Server wipe

[wiredlogic]

How unfortunate for the outgoing administration that the best fix for the Bedlam will be a complete server wipe.

Re:Bedlam...

[Captain Splendid]

The problem here is that the average user is just going to click the first "reply" button he sees, and if that happens to be Reply All,

You know, it occurs to me that there is an easy fix.

Install Thunderbird, right-click on the toolbar and choose 'Customize', then remove the Reply-all button. In fact, I'm going to go do this on all the machines I administer ASAP.