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BT Funnels All Customers' Sent Emails Into One Guy's Inbox (theregister.co.uk)

Posted by msmash on from the poor-guy-Steve dept.

Shaun Nichols, reporting for The Register: The UK's biggest broadband provider BT redirected its customers' outgoing emails to a single account for three hours on Tuesday. The telco said the flooded inbox was an internal account it uses for test purposes and not a random unlucky subscriber. While BT did not provide details on the reason for the disruption, it appears to be the result of testing or maintenance gone awry. "A small number of customers reported an issue sending emails earlier. Sorry about this, it's fixed now," BT said in a statement to El Reg. "The mailbox in the delivery failure notification was for internal/test use and appeared in error, sorry for any confusion that caused." The emails were going to an account which belonged to someone named Steve Webb. The Register reports that Steve Webb works for one of BT's contractors. For Webb, I fear, Tuesday wasn't a productive day.

45 comments

  1. You fools! You blew it all up! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Ironically this is not unlike what happened with Chernobyl...

    1. Re: You fools! You blew it all up! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Yeah! It sounds exactly like what happened at Chernobyl except with a few minor exceptions. Ya know like people getting radiation poisoning and the planet being trashed for 250,000 years.

  2. This Steve, by mjwx · · Score: 5, Funny

    This Steve, is what happens when you piss off a sysadmin.

    --
    Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
    1. Re:This Steve, by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      Hi, this is Steve. I read all this emails. Did you know that they are planning to outsource IT to India this year?

    2. Re:This Steve, by NatasRevol · · Score: 1

      How old are your emails?

      --
      There are two types of people in the world: Those who crave closure
    3. Re:This Steve, by mjwx · · Score: 0

      Hi, this is Steve. I read all this emails.

      Given the standard of your grammar, I can only assume your position has already gone.

      How's the weather in Mumbai this time of year.

      --
      Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
    4. Re: This Steve, by buchanmilne · · Score: 1

      We normally just forward postmaster@ to abusive staff for an hour. Usually keeps them busy deleting emails (so the next few thousand can be delivered) for the rest of the day without impacting customers.

  3. At least it wasn't one gal's inbox by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    That would define momentous.

  4. Steve is a Spook by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Clearly the "contractor" Steve works for is MI5.

  5. The cure was worse than the problem... by __aaclcg7560 · · Score: 1, Funny

    When the I LOVE YOU virus struck in the late 1990's, I was working for a French company in Silicon Valley and logged into Outlook that morning. I thought it was weird to get an email from the CEO with the subject line I LOVE YOU and wondered if all French people were gay. The emails kept coming after that. What killed the email server was the anti-virus scanner sending out email notifications that the virus got removed in addition to the "cleaned" I LOVE YOU emails that kept coming through. The system admin didn't have a productive day.

    1. Re:The cure was worse than the problem... by Solandri · · Score: 2

      Reminds me of a time back in the mid-1990s. I was helping run a server which hosted an email list. It had a 500 MB hard drive, which was wasn't huge but was fine for our purposes at the time. Someone tried to email an *uncompressed* photo (BMP instead of JPG) from a 2 MP digital camera (so about 6 MB in size) to the entire mailing list. The email server had dutifully copied the photo to the mailbox for each recipient whose mail was hosted on the server, until it ran out of disk space and crashed. It also got bounce messages from systems whose wiser admins had blocked attachments that large, which filled up the the mail admin's mailbox with multiple copies of the 6 MB photo (one per bounce - we'd configured the mail admin to get copies of all bounce messages so we could prune dead addresses from the list).

      It crashed hard - I couldn't even login over the network. I had to use the console to get in and figure out what the problem was. The first few copies of the photo I deleted from people's mailboxes, postfix (or whatever email server we were using) noticed there was now space available on the drive, and immediately copied the photo to more recipients' mailboxes thus filling the disk again. I had to take a crash course on postfix to figure out how to delete an email from the send queue.

    2. Re:The cure was worse than the problem... by __aaclcg7560 · · Score: 1

      It crashed hard - I couldn't even login over the network.

      A coworker accidentally sent a 36MB core dump file to everyone in the company that crashed the server in 1997. Took the admin three days to manually delete ~300 copies.

  6. at least by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    At least they didn't delete all their servers like others have been

  7. GCHQ? by BenJeremy · · Score: 2

    Sounds more like this "Contractor" Steve Webb might have been collecting intell for a bit, and BT just turned the spigot on full by accident?

    1. Re:GCHQ? by Pitawg · · Score: 1

      Secure Web Server for Email Inqisition was the intended recipient. Someone used "SWEB" instead of "SWEBSEI" for the account to which it was to redirect all email of users. That early enter key blew their "secret".

    2. Re:GCHQ? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      NO. It's not testing for some single account.... it's being enabled to copy ALL emails passing through their system to GCHQ for PERMANENT storage, ANALYSIS, DATAMINING, CRIMINILIZATION, SURVEILLANCE and BLACKMAIL, etc.

      WAKE UP SHEEPLE.

  8. unclear by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    all customers, all email providers? rewrote all email headers? can anybody elaborate?

    1. Re: unclear by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I'd expect someone was mucking about with domain masquerading or something like that.

      MASQUERADE_AS('.') Or something stupid like that.

      Never tried it. Steve is the unlucky chap with a catch-all mailbox.

  9. Mistake? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Conspiracy theorists might have fun with this one. Does this mailbox happen to be accessible by law enforcement or intelligence agencies?

  10. Sounds more like data capture gone awry by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    There is no reason to ever send "all email" to one particular mailbox unless you are specifically trying to send all mail to one particular mailbox. This wasn't maintenance gone awry. This was an attempt to capture all email to send it to Interested Third Parties gone awry.

    1. Re:Sounds more like data capture gone awry by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      And all it takes is "always_bcc = $Address" and nobody would notice. No need to redirect anything immaterial at all. ;)

  11. Steve's linked in profile! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    https://www.linkedin.com/in/steve-webb-6a640a2

  12. Failing fast by mileshigh · · Score: 1, Informative

    Electricity, my car's brakes, email: failure NOT OK. Their dependability is what makes them useful.

    Nimble; agile. failing fast. It's a valuable idea, but it's not for every organization. If you're developing something new, failure is probably OK as long as you can pick up the pieces.

    If you're on the operational side of making something work day in and day out, it it NOT OK. Most outfits fall into that category.

    Seems like I'm hearing more & more of my customers adopting the"fail fast, fail often" mantra. I say you have to seriously consider which kind of outfit you are before you drink that particular Kool Aid du jour!

    1. Re:Failing fast by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Electricity, my car's brakes, email: failure NOT OK!

      If you consider email failure to remotely be in the same category as car brake failure, I would not want to driving a car in front of yours!

    2. Re:Failing fast by GuB-42 · · Score: 1

      This, or if he is a sysadmin, you should hire him.
      Here is a bonus xkcd for you : https://xkcd.com/705/

  13. TRASH11 by sims+2 · · Score: 1

    This reminds me of an old daily wtf.

    http://thedailywtf.com/article...

    --
    Minimum threshold fixed. Thanks!
  14. Where? by freeze128 · · Score: 1

    Is "El Reg" the Spanish arm of "The Register"?

  15. I still get random BT emails... by tlhIngan · · Score: 1

    What I don't get is BT sends me emails all the time about one of their customers. They apparently run a business and bought a business line and ADSL service, and I get notifications when it's in for service, invoices, etc.

    What I don't get is how I can stop it - I tried the links and they don't work, and I even tried logging into the guy's BT account, but it always claims the email is invalid (I'm sitting on all the guy's details - phone numbers, addresses, etc).

    The other thing I don't get is how these kind of emails make it to my personal domain (which isn't a .com as that was taken, so I have a .net). Did they purposely use my domain to send their notifications of service installs and such to me? Or what?

  16. Could have been worse (humor) by glassKarma · · Score: 1

    Could have been worse -- could have been a distribution list Could have been even worse -- could have been a distribution list with even a single BT email address on it. Keep 'em coming. (What are the chances he's a contractor working on BT's email system)?

    1. Re:Could have been worse (humor) by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Of course it could have been worse, it could have been an email service that customers actually use. BT broadband customers do not use the BT ISP address.

  17. Most Productive Day I've Had All Year. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    EOM

    -Steve Webb

  18. Surveillance... everywhere... by zarmanto · · Score: 1

    ... For Webb, I fear, Tuesday wasn't a productive day. ...

    Or, depending upon which set of conspiracy theories you subscribe to, perhaps today was a very productive day for Mr. Webb...

  19. How does this happen? by tom229 · · Score: 2

    I'm not really aware of the postfix configuration parameter 'forward_all_mail_to'. Typically, a mail transfer agent program will look up a recipient in a user table, and if there's no match, will bounce the message. How are they configured that Steve can become the default recipient for all mail... by accident? Suspicious to say the least.

    --
    If it ain't broke, don't fix it.
    1. Re:How does this happen? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      always_bcc=foo@example.com

      would do it for postfix. But this is was most likely a screwup on more complex LDAP/AD-based mail routing.

    2. Re:How does this happen? by phorm · · Score: 1

      I've used something like this before. When you have a QA system, you don't want to accidentally send out emails that people might confuse with a production alert etc (but you still need to test the alert emails, etc). You *could* change configs to have special accounts for non-prod systems - assuming you can track down all the config entries - but what you can also do is rejig the mailserver config so that the destination address is rewritten and goes to a special mailserver/inbox for testing systems.

      Obviously, you don't want to be a dumbass and send all your production emails to a single inbox... but apparently this guy didn't get that memo.

  20. For you by SuiteSisterMary · · Score: 1

    For you, the day that your emails were all redirected was the most memorable day of your life. But for Webb? For Webb, it was a Tuesday.

    --
    Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
  21. Not one guy. Some test account by 140Mandak262Jamuna · · Score: 1

    They did not send it to any one's email. They simply sent it to the debug mail box.

    --
    sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
  22. Telcom forwaring emails? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Steve Webb? I was expecting Devadatta Null.

  23. wop the fuck by Hognoxious · · Score: 1

    They've employed Marco Marsala. It's how he does a backup.

    --
    Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
  24. Re: You fools! You blew it all up! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    No, no, it is totally like what happened at Chernobyl.
    One day, the mailman put all the daily mail into a single mailbox, so much that is damaged it. Maybe he drank too much vodka but it clearly pissed off the neighborhood.
    For some reason no one seems to remember this anecdote. The nearby power plant failed just a little bit and for some reason, it's all people talk about nowadays.

  25. That's nothing... by mu51c10rd · · Score: 1

    Try running a monitoring system that hangs and considers all devices/services/paths down...

  26. INSIDIOUS INTENT by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    There's a bigger explanation behind this. And it definitely has something to do with the Illuminati masterminding a plan, along with that evil Obama to make us all gay, and those evil Christians to force our children to pray in school, and the pharmaceutical companies to make us into gay prayer slaves. The only way to protect yourself is by wearing some sort of ultra thin sheet of metal somewhere on your body, to keep, the, monkeys out, the patio deck isna dirty my, money i like cake,

  27. Re:You fools! You blew it all up! by Big+Hairy+Ian · · Score: 1

    A former colleague of mine once fucked up a mail shot and sent 30000 letters to the same guy at the same address. It got all the way to the sorting office before someone noticed :D

    --

    Build a Man a Fire, and He'll Be Warm for a Day. Set a Man on Fire, and He'll Be Warm for the Rest of His Life.