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IT support friend of mine told me a story how the place where he worked (major US bank) basically took its whole email infrastructure offline when the company e
by code4tee 6y ago
IT support friend of mine told me a story how the place where he worked (major US bank) basically took its whole email infrastructure offline when the company essentially DDOSed itself with a single email.
Someone in IT was testing an email distribution list for the whole company (CEO announcements, that sort of thing) and sent out a test email to the effect of “Hello, did this work?”.
Two problems.
1. They had emailed the whole company for real, not the test list they thought they emailed
2. The list was setup such that anyone in the company could email it and also send a message to all other employees in the bank.
Within about 5 minutes everyone in the bank had hundreds of emails turning up. Initially this was people saying “Yes I got it”. Before long people were emailing to say “Please stop sending all these emails” which in turn got sent to the whole company.
Of course some people then started replying all to tell people to stop replying which only added fuel to the fire. The exponential traffic growth effectively brought the email system to halt for many hours until the mess could be cleaned up.
- Someone 6y agoEven tech companies such as Microsoft (https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/exchange/2004/04/08/me-too/ https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/exchange/2004/04/08/me-t... or https://www.businessinsider.nl/microsoft-employee-github-reply-all-email-storm-2019-1 https://www.businessinsider.nl/microsoft-employee-github-rep...) aren’t immune to that. The generic term for this kind of thing is “email storm” or “reply apocalypse” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Email_storm https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Email_storm)
- pedrocx486 6y agoThe main problem I always see to that is the fact that reply all doesn't have an confirmation or isn't the default. I had similar issues back at an large company, some users replying 1k people sharing an unique link to an internal questionnaire because someone before them replied the original email asking for the link. That and permissions, never let something like this be accessed by end users.
- Someone 6y agoIMO, the problem starts with sending an email to thousands of recipients (or groups containing thousands) in the “To:” or “CC:” field. I cannot think of cases where that is the right thing to do. If you want to host a discussion with thousands of people in real life, you let people send in questions beforehand, manually filter and group them, then hold a panel discussion between a selected representative group (or something similar) Discussions over email are harder to do than face-to-face ones, so, at the least, that’s what you should do with email to. If, on the other hand, you want to inform thousands of people, using BCC is fine. If you want to make sure everybody knows that a message is sent to thousands, start the email with “this message was sent to everybody in the foo, bar, and baz departments” or something similar.
- imtringued 6y agoUsually you have a moderator that manually approves messages before they actually get sent to all members of a company wide distribution list.
- xiconfjs 6y agoWe had a similar problem at my last company, where out boss sent a mail with his trip photos to the access limited everyone@ list - so our mailserver had a good 2 hours downtime while filling 2k email boxes with 20MB of attachments...what a mess