Idiots
Also did no one explain that you cant "recall" an email. At most you can ask your own exchange server to remove it, but that counts for SFA once its left your internal system.
Exam board in 'send all' fail: Hands up who knows what the BCC button is for?
Exam board OCR has been caught red-faced in a schoolboy email error involving 900* of its maths markers. In a screenshot of the email seen by The Register, the body sent out an invitation to all its A Level maths markers to apply to mark its module next year. It said: "Can you please let me know if you are still interested in …
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Friday 6th November 2015 10:13 GMT Lee D
Re: Idiots
The number of times I've had to explain this.
And, no, not every system will send read-receipts, and certainly not any I'm in charge of by default even if they are capable.
Don't even get me started on "I got a bounceback - did my email get sent properly?" or the myriad reasons that a email might not arrive that have NOTHING to do with our IT or whether things our end are working.
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Friday 6th November 2015 14:30 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Idiots
I once had a support call from a guy saying that the ends of all his incoming emails were getting cut off part way through. So I got to his desk and he showed me the poblem, and then explained to him what the scrollbar at the right of the preview pane was for. Consider your users to be highly sophisticated.
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Friday 6th November 2015 20:34 GMT This Side Up
Re: Idiots
Yes, but not just the excchange server. I remember somebody sending me a snottygram at work and then sending three or four recall messages, all of which I received. I was using Netscape Communicator on my PC and not the approved Outlook. I had a good chuckle.
My usual reaction to a recall message was to reply saying "Yes of course you can have it back. Here it is." with the offending message attached.
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Friday 6th November 2015 09:59 GMT Doctor Syntax
A while ago I had an email like that from someone I'd corresponded with a year or two earlier. Apparently some people from her address book had been spammed with one of those "help I'm stranded in foreign parts" scams. She wasn't sure who'd been spammed so she sent the email out to everyone on her list, about 200 addresses IIRC. I wrote back to her to advise her how to do it properly next time.
Oh dear, I've just remembered, I forgot to include her in my change of address emails earlier this year. What a shame.
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Friday 6th November 2015 10:12 GMT John Miles 1
Happens all the time - but could mail systems help
I've been a recipient of long Cc: lists from well meaning senders, and occasionally done this kind of thing by accident ( though not on that scale ).
In this spam/phishing era perhaps mail programs could help by adding a few more functions and checking
e.g.
- Have a 'Send with recipients hidden' button to make it easy/obvious ( though same functionality as Bcc)
- Have a check that prompts 'Did you really mean to send this to 100 visible recipients' ( where the limit 100 or whatever is user configurable).
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Friday 6th November 2015 10:33 GMT Fred Dibnah
Re: Does anyone else wince when they see this phrase?
Yes indeed, because we all know what it really means:
We do not take the protection of personal data at all seriously. A superficial review of our procedures has been launched and no measures will be put in place to make sure this does not happen again.
FTFThem
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Friday 6th November 2015 10:37 GMT A K Stiles
Re: Does anyone else wince when they see this phrase?
It mostly make me think that, after some serious discussion between non-technical management types, possibly over several lunches (on expenses of course), they'll publish an internal policy that all emails sent outside the company should be sent individually, by hand, to each address...
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Friday 6th November 2015 11:25 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Does anyone else wince when they see this phrase?
A full review of our procedures has been launched and measures will be put in place to make sure this does not happen again
Yes. "We're sorry that we accidentally set fire to the curtains and the whole house burned down, we are putting measures in place that this does not happen again" - well, yes numpty, BUT IT HAS ALREADY HAPPENED, so how are you going to fix that? You can't unsend that data, and if that list gets abused you are responsible for it. Morons. I hope you get fined something painful.
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Friday 6th November 2015 14:44 GMT Chris Miller
Re: Does anyone else wince when they see this phrase?
Very much the same as hearing "your call is important to us" after you've been on hold for 5 minutes, to which the only possible answer is:
No it bloody isn't, otherwise you'd pay for sufficient agents to answer your calls in a reasonable amount of time, you cheapskates.
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Friday 6th November 2015 21:34 GMT Captain DaFt
Re: Does anyone else wince when they see this phrase?
“We take the protection of personal data very seriously. A full review of our procedures has been launched and measures will be put in place to make sure this does not happen again.”
That always parses to me as: "We fucked up, we don't care. Here's some waffle to shut you up about it."
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Friday 6th November 2015 11:32 GMT sysconfig
Standard excuse, and all is well...
“We take the protection of personal data very seriously. A full review of our procedures has been launched and measures will be put in place to make sure this does not happen again.”
You seem to hear this phrase almost daily in either the same words or minor variations. It means fuck-all.
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Friday 6th November 2015 11:42 GMT psychonaut
“We take the protection of ...blah blah
very seriously. so seriously in fact, that we've literally just fucked up and done it. its possibly not the first time, but who can tell because we have absolutely no way of knowing or auditing this stuff and the kind of people we let near this data have a level of understanding of using an email program no greater than a lemur. anyways, heres some words that we made up over lunch that sounded good to help you feel better
“We take the protection of personal data very seriously. A full review of our procedures has been launched and measures will be put in place to make sure this does not happen again.”
hope this helps! may the seed of your loin be fruitfull in the belly of your woman. Neil.
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Friday 6th November 2015 12:27 GMT badger31
I can one-up this.
I used to do freelance IT work for an SMB. A manager decided it would be a good idea to to send a charity fund raiser email to their customers (without consulting the boss). The manager did this using the company customer management system. The CMS integrated with Outlook to send the bulk email (1000s of recipients) by putting all the email addresses into the 'to' field. This caused all kinds of trouble.
First of all, the 'to' field was overloaded, so the email was malformed and should have been rejected by 1: The CMS, 2: Outlook, 3: Exchange server, 4: inbound mail servers. The exchange server got stuck in a loop constantly trying to resend a malformed email, with many of the recipients receiving the email multiple times, along with a list of everyone else's email address. Many of the email addresses were out of use or had some kind of automated response, causing a deluge of incoming mail (along side all the customer complaints and malformed email responses). That message was ridiculously hard to exorcise from the Exchange sever - it just would give up.
When the dust settled, there was much groveling to do. This was a data security company, so they lost quite a lot of custom because of this. Needless to say, said manager was out the door shortly after.
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Friday 6th November 2015 13:15 GMT Named coward
Re: I can one-up this.
There's no such limit that would make the email malformed (but the SMTP server can have built in limits which are supposed to return an error). You might have encountered the bug which also caused this: http://blogs.technet.com/b/exchange/archive/2004/04/08/109626.aspx
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Saturday 7th November 2015 09:31 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: I can one-up this.
There's no such limit that would make the email malformed (but the SMTP server can have built in limits which are supposed to return an error).
Did you not read? It involved AND Outlook AND Exchange. Of course that will screw up, it is barely able to handle normal email.
Bonus questions:
1- did this happen in an EU country? Did people complain about using their email address for marketing without having given explicit permission?
2 - WTF is a data security company doing using Microsoft software?
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Friday 6th November 2015 15:53 GMT MR J
In dealing with several scout groups in the past I can tell you that most of the north west scout leaders have seen my email address. This was the best way in the past for people to harvest email addresses for malware/dos/bad stuff. I have even seen people install malware because the email was sent to "other" people they know, and they were sure that 7 or 8 people all getting the same email must mean it is okay.
Personally, I wish the CC field would be dropped completely and only BCC would remain!
Biting the hand that feeds IT
