Thirteenthousandsevenhundredfiftyeight messages and counting
by Volker Weber
Now that is an overflowing mailbox. To really f*ck things up, you need a computer.
Comments
'Tis nothing. Try being postmaster for 30k+ users, some of which believe the message "forward copies of this to all of your friends and you'll have good luck". All of them use Outlook which means they can add as many recipients to the outgoing message as they want. Exchange happily builds the illegal-sized header and pushes the thousands of copies onto the net.
It's not until the messages start bouncing because the header is well over 64K that the problems start. Exchanges ISM also refuses to accept the oversized header from external servers. So every time the franken-mail passes through our systems (our equipment is intermediary for both directions), I get a copy (of each original and each courtesy copy bounced back to the original).
Luckily, our internal server was designed for such idiocy. The only denial of service it creates is the one on my patience. And that's before someone else hits "Reply to all" to say, "Take me off your list!".
Personal record for one weekend was well over 60k messages and involved two hoaxes, a virus, and a mailing loop. Thank Larry for Perl!
Roughly a semi-monthly (twice a month?) event. Grrr.....
Since when do you use Outlook? Because of Kubi?
We briefly had a look with a trial version, me on Notes and my partner on Lookout (really funny, once a day I hear him moaning, complaining and angrily shouting, but he wouldn't touch Notes ;-).
The Kubi Notes integration installs a couple of databases which appear mmmhhh, not really convincing. My partner complained that he could not share Kubi contacts with his normal Watchout contacts or/and the other way round.
As I mentioned, we had a brief look, we might have missed things, but we are not convinced. And the pricing seems prohibitive to viral spreading of Kubi by cross-company teams.
No, I am neither using Windows XP nor Outlook. :-) Well, that is not entirely true. I do have XP in a Virtual PC on Lucy but that does not really count.
As you can see this mailbox belongs to a friend at Whocares.de: Chief PHP Wrangler Stefan. :-)
