Thanks to all who responded. We are going to put a pattern in the attributes for the field which forces entry of something that at least looks like an email address.
Jerry Jerry Niman Tel +44 (0)161-247 1474 Head of Information Systems Email [EMAIL PROTECTED] the Manchester Metropolitan University Mobile +44 (0)7770 638104 Before acting on this email or opening any attachments you should read the Manchester Metropolitan Universitys email disclaimer available on its website http://www.mmu.ac.uk/emaildisclaimer >>> "Shellman, David" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> 19 Feb 07 13:10 >>> Jerry, You will find that many characters, including - and *, get translated in a manner that causes the email engine to send to every one in the User form. In turn if there the email address field is blank in the User form, the engine will use the login as the email alias. We have had to add logic to catch this condition and generate an error message that the email address is not valid. Dave -----Original Message----- From: Action Request System discussion list(ARSList) [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Jerry Niman Sent: Monday, February 19, 2007 7:41 AM To: [email protected] Subject: EMailing the Universe All right - a bit of an exaggeration... ARS 6.03.00 patch 013 Solaris 8 Oracle 9.2.0.1.0 We recently had ain incident logged in our Problem schema in ARS, and because the email address of the person reporting the problem is a mandatory field, but the person taking the call didn't get the information, a hyphen, "-" was entered under Email Address. When the problem was closed, the workflow sends a confirmation by Email to the person who reported it. This meant that ARS attempted send an email to the email address "-". It appears to have interpreted this as "all ARS Users". The majority of ARS users don't yet have defined email addresses, so as well as hundreds of confused recipients of a confirmation email about a problem they know nothing about, there were thousands of exception reports in the AREmail.sh_log and the Email daemon crashed. The obvious course of action is to put some validation workflow on the email address field, and a default "null" email address for all the user records. My question is, is this what you would expect ARS to do under these circumstances? I wasn't aware that "-" was a wildcard. Jerry Jerry Niman Tel +44 (0)161-247 1474 Head of Information Systems Email [EMAIL PROTECTED] the Manchester Metropolitan University Mobile +44 (0)7770 638104 Before acting on this email or opening any attachments you should read the Manchester Metropolitan University's email disclaimer available on its website http://www.mmu.ac.uk/emaildisclaimer ________________________________________________________________________ _______ UNSUBSCRIBE or access ARSlist Archives at www.arslist.org ARSlist:"Where the Answers Are" _______________________________________________________________________________ UNSUBSCRIBE or access ARSlist Archives at www.arslist.org ARSlist:"Where the Answers Are" _______________________________________________________________________________ UNSUBSCRIBE or access ARSlist Archives at www.arslist.org ARSlist:"Where the Answers Are"
