On Jan 23, 11:53pm, Roger Horne wrote:
> A single email was sent by the powers that be[1]
[...]
Similar thing happened when I worked at ICL many moons ago. Some executive
sent an email to the 'icl' alias, which for some mind-bogglingly stupid
reason was a valid alias expanding to everyone who worked for ICL.
After an hour or so, the mail host had failed to deliver this one message
to all NN thousand recipients, so it tried to resend it. But of course
the machine and network were already a little busy trying to send the
first message so it didn't get too far before deciding it had failed and
re-sending it. GOTO 10.
Meanwhile, the usual bunch of all-knowing, self-righteous idiots with
nothing better to do (i.e. failed technical people promoted to middle
management) starting sending replies to the sender telling him not to
use the global 'icl' alias for such messages. Naturally, they wanted
everyone to share from the benefit of their wisdom so they made sure
that the original 'icl' distribution was kept intact.
Meanwhile, the usual bunch of know-nothing, self-important idiots with
nothing better to do (i.e. failed middle management moved sideways to
another middle managment position) starting sending replies to everyone
demanding that they stop being sent duplicate copies of all these different
emails. cc'd to 'icl', of course, because the default (using OfficePower,
a truly jank ICL middleware system) was to simply copy the To: and CC: list
from the original message.
Naturally, it wasn't long before the whole shebang ground to a halt and
fell deeply into castors-up mode.
One of the interesting things I discovered in the ensuing
disentanglement of mail was that our expertly configured mail system
would have accepted mail from the outside world to huge aliases like
'icl'. Could we spell "Dinial of Serviss"? I think not. But I
gleefully shirked my responsibilies and didn't tell anyone about it,
just in case I decided to become a disgruntled ex-employee with a
grudge at some point in future. :-)=
There was a moral in this story but I forgot it in the process of
rambling on. Probably something about munging Reply-To, or putting
all middle management up against a wall and shooting them (which ICL
did a short while later).
A
--
Andy Wardley <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Signature regenerating. Please remain seated.
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]> For a good time: http://www.kfs.org/~abw/
