NHS IT bod sends test email to 850k users – and then responses are sent 'reply all' A test email sent by accident to 850,000 NHS workers has caused utter chaos after being sent from an apparently incorrectly configured* email distribution list. The sender, whom The Register will identify only as R, sent the blank message with a subject line that simply read "test" to a distribution list called …
I'm seeing more and more posts like this on el reg that take the side of the user.
The thing is, nobody but you has even made the IT dept vs User comparison. It doesn't make sense here?
I've made a separate post, but I actually have IT experience in the NHS...
All dist lists were managed by a manager or clinical lead. The actual IT function was merely dictated to by staff
I felt lonely then pushing back against 'testing' a dist list, and I doubt the culture has changed.
Everyone, be it a user or especially IT staff, could do with understanding the logic behind email.
I would like to know if the person implicated was following orders....
NHS culture suggests they won't be going anywhere though.
Where I used to work they imposed restrictions on the use of the "all" mailing list after an employee used it to express an ethical conflict with a bonus scam scheme. Naïve or not, it was relatively well formulated, but the next day that email had magically vanished from every mailbox in the company as if it never existed (except from my machine because I dumped it in print :) ). I heard later that he was marched off the premises but I wouldn't feel sorry for him - I'll get to the why later.
From that moment on, the "all" mailbox could only be used by a restricted set of people. Not that it mattered much, to entertain myself on the last day I was working there I dumped the list of all the department mailing lists and did one leaving email which copied in all those lists, in effect bypassing the restrictions on "all" just to show how pointless it was. Thanks to the "read" flag I attached I could see that I'd managed to get my email read by over 85% of the company, and that included 3 separate hits by the CEO :).
Oh, that employee? He went on to become a multi-millionaire. Well worth the exit IMHO :)
"Can any one of you thumbs down people explain WHY you voted me down?"
The question mark at the end of the second paragraph; El Reg grammar pedantry is legendary.
Honestly, you didn't get the joke and provided an incoherent response in a whiny tone. I didn't down vote you but you deserved them all. Be informative, be funny, or advance the conversation.
I'm afraid I can't take your (smaller text) criticism at all seriously when after the first, throwaway line, which is valid if admittedly not "with" the joke, I go through my NHS experience.
Which, oddly, got upvotes elsewhere in this very thread..
I strongly suspect bandwagon jumping and not reading the full post. Your loss, not mine. It was informative and advanced the conversation. Sorry it wasn't a lame slice of sarcasm.
Goodbye, anyway. I have better things to do than be downvoted for not laughing at crap jokes :)
Um, I didn't downvote you, but you just realise that he more you question it, the more you'll get!
As for your message, it was written very confusingly, but what I could get out of it was that you felt it necessary to pompously "show off" to a bunch of techie readers, on a techie site, that when you worked for the NHS, it was the unit managers who actually had a say in what they used their computers for.
The bit about them not taking IT advice is valid, but you just "authoritatively" told us something that 90% of us have experienced, and the other 10% could have guessed anyway.
Oh yeah, it bugs me too when people put question-marks on sentences that aren't questions? :-)
Anyway, no offense intended, (really) - I'm sure you're a nice guy, but you did keep asking for a response!
I wonder if that is the biggest email deployment in the world that isn't an ISP or webmail provider?
In the list of world's largest employers:
US Department of Defense[sic] That one could be larger, but they are spread over loads of .mil and .gov domains, so maybe each one has a separate email service? Also, I don't know if all the regular squaddies have email addresses.
People's Liberation Army Again, the regular squaddies probably won't have email addresses.
Walmart The likes of asda.com (their UK operation) will presumably be on a separate email service, and checkout operators, shelf stackers, warehouse operatives, cleaners and so on probably won't have email addresses.
McDonalds Only the largest if you include the employess who work for franchises, and the burger flippers probably won't have email addresses.
NHS is 5th on the list. Just over half the employees are admin staff, and they will all have email addresses. The clinical staff and most maintenance staff will also need to use email. That leaves the likes of the cleaners, hospital porters and catering staff who maybe don't need email.
I got a chuckle out of the BBC article showing a tweet of someone congratulating someone else for telling the original poster about the email going to everyone but doing so also with a reply all and a read receipt request as well. Sure that person really thought they were helping matters.
From the article it seems that the problem is not that they had 1.2 million users in the CC box, but that somebody created a distribution group which contained other distribution groups, which probably contained other distribution groups etc.
The perils of making changes to things when asleep on Monday mornings or Friday afternoons...
We had this very same cock-up happen a long time ago at a company I worked at: someone in HR (of course) sent an email to every email address in the corporate directory including all groups. Our email platform at the time didn't filter for duplicate recipients, so how many mail groups you were a member of determined how many copies of the pointless HR verbiage you got.
We did an informal correlation of number of duplicates received with position in corporate food chain. Perhaps not surprisingly, we found high correlation up to middle management; the correlation then rapidly reduced as seniority increased. Our theory, born out by experience, was that our very senior managers had little or no interest in the day-to-day happenings of the company they were running, but instead had their rose-tinted view supplied to them by more junior drones.
Reply to All was the bane of my life at one of the places I worked a few years ago. It got so bad I was asked if we could remove it from up high because what started off as an email conversation between 2 people, ended up going back and forth with more people added, to the point that towards the end, 30 or mo people were now in the To: / CC: field.
There was no automated way at the time to remove or even displace it automatically without visiting each user, and making all the relevant clicks in their profile.
As per subject*, this proves people-power can be just as effective as automation!
Or we add an 'are you sure?' to the reply-all function so we can pretend something was done about it when we know full well that most users will just click 'yeah whatever' like with every other prompt**.
* complete with only-for-old-people reference
** did this once, had a lucky escape, but the memory of those moments of shtshtshtfufufu-phew won't ever go away
As we have limited mobile signal at work, my wife, who works at an isolated doctor's site, used to occasionally send me an email to get milk on the way home, or more importantly pick up a child.
The mails from the NHS are always delayed by an hour or two, but the worst we have seen is 9 days - 7 within the NHS servers and then 2 when my companies system threw a wobbly (presumably as the email was so old). For important and time critical communication they have to revert to printing the email and faxing an image!
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In a previous life I had to inform volunteers who used the IT systems of the charity I worked for that if they had to send an email to over 5 people (which is very common within this charity) they shouldn't put all the recipients emails in to the To: field or the CC: field, and if they could they should put them in the Bcc: field instead.
I had this one thick (as in deliberately obtuse) person flat out say she wouldn't do what I told her to do. In front of 20 other people. I asked her why, she said she didn't want to. I ask her why again (two can be obtuse as well dickhead) and she repeated her answer. I ask her 2 more times and she fires up "Oh my God I told you already why do you keep asking the same question!?". I answered "Imagine now that was an email you sent to 200 people, all of their emails in the CC field, and every one of those recipients hit Reply All asking you why you didn't use the Bcc field and why everyone now has their email address, and why can they see everyone's reply".
She looked fairly stupid, especially with the 20 other people sat around looking either a bit awkward at her dumbness or smiling that she had hung herself with her own dumbness.
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So this wasn't at all like the problem reported.
The problem in this case was that there was an NHS.net distribution list with 1.2 million email addresses in it in the first place that anyone in the NHS could send an email to.
What is an anti-IT sentiment? Is "IT" now some kind of minority group that needs protection from persecution by anti-IT bigots (who probably read dreadful newspapers and vote for even worse)? And is there a way of distinguishing one Anonymous Coward from another that allows "IT" people to know when it is the same anti-IT bigot repeatedly posting the Wrong Kind of sentiment?.
This was definitely caused by a very poorly configured dynamic distribution list, being that that function is now no longer available....
DDL's were only made available 6 weeks ago or so, I'm amazed it's taken this long for the 'reply to allpocalypse' to happen.
I'm told the offending list has been deleted, but *a lot* of people replied to all to it before it was removed - the system is choking on the backlog
I'm thinking that the Senior Associate ICT Delivery Facilitator will be having a few meetings with higher ups to explain how you can mess up the setting up /editing of a simple email distribution group.
Well either that or everybody takes the piss out of the person for the next couple of months and then someone brings it back up every now and again just so that everybody doesn't forget.
I've currently had 81. But the latest ones were from around 0930 (3.5 hours ago) so there may still be hundreds - if not thousands - more emails from retarH^H^H^H^H^H^H baffled people coming my way.
What's most ridiculous is that the original didn't even ask recipients to do anything, it just said 'test' in the subject, and a person's email signature.
The strongest muscles in my body are quickly becoming the ones that I use to roll my eyes.
For those on the inside, my Spiceworks install created the now infamous "899" response to the original unsolicited mail. Server was taken offline as soon as the flood was discovered, we've seen far in excess of 2K responses so far.
It's been popcorn in this cinema time since about 10h00...
I saw this starting early this morning but it was already too late to do anything about it.
I think some of the early repliers could be forgiven, as it was not at all clear from looking at the original test email what had happened. It was from 'R' and simply contained the innocous 'CroydonPractices' in the cc field, and so one might easily have assumed you had be included by mistake. Given the size of the NHS address book this is pretty common, as most of us have namesakes around the NHS somewhere with very similar addressess (eg I have an alter ego who is a radiographer, and I used to get emails about scout group meetings and all sorts of things intended for someone else with the same name).
It was only after an hour or so that it became clear what had happened, when the number of puzzled replies began to ramp up. I did send a 'please do not reply all to this email' early on so I have probably ultimately not helped, but at that point it was not clear how widely it had gone.
Really one should not be able to include so many addresses in a mailing list, and no doubt we will see such a measure coming in now. This is one of the perils of such a large internal email system with a single address book which has probably not received sufficient attention up to now.
Your wrong email problem would be improved if someone had come up with a standard naming policy. My wife receives email intended for some high up in the NHS. Only difference in the address is the '.' between first and last name.
This stuff was sorted 15 years ago, shouldn't happen any more.
Few subdomains would help too - everyone, even external users, are on the same nhs.net.
Our smart IT department has decided that this is a phishing exercise designed to pillage our contact lists and put a big warning on the Trust intranet front page. Didn't think so myself after looking through the source of the original message: Hanlon's Razor applies yet again.
Anonymous for obvious reasons.
A long time ago, the place I was working had a 3 day mail outage. I doubt any trust would have one that long nowadays. But a national system? This could be longer.
The whole thread will be made up of "important" people complaining that they are getting confusing emails and want it to stop. Then other important people complain about that one. Return to start...
This could be a good thing as it might help prevent the centralisation that the NHS.net will become.
A long time ago, the place I was working had a 3 day mail outage
Also a long time ago, when widespread corporate email was still a "new thing" and not everyone in the company had access to a computer, let alone an email address, the mail systems of the group I worked for were connected using 28k8bps dial-up modems, which dialled on demand - direct to the appropriate receiving modem (none of this send-it-via-the-internet stuff).
Somebody decided to send an everyone-on-the-system email, announcing a new launch (or maybe it was just a logo change) and had scanned, in 32bit colour, a black-and-white logo which came to a total of around 10MBytes.
Bearing in mind that the "mail server" was a re-purposed 286 with 512kB memory and a 40MB hard drive, and that in those days a typical desktop computer was a 386 with 2MB or a 486 with 4MB and that one poor secretary had (IIRC) a 286 with 1MB and a 20MB HDD (yes, just about enough room for WfW3.11 and a basic Office installation), there were some people who actually got control of their computers back by lunchtime, but others had to wait until the next day.
I had to run around the building warning people to delete that message and not to open it; the amount of page-file thrashing that ensued tied the computers up for another hour... well for a long time, anyway. Not that long waits were uncommon with MS Mail.
I don't think there were any serious effects on that particular manager, but a later send-to-all email, which was a simple 2kB text email containing a slightly "off" joke did result in disciplinary action I believe, and an edict that nobody should ever send-to-all again.
M.
I am not as familiar with other OWAs but the NHS one is currently offering me 4 options with nothing set to default.
Delete - Reply - Reply All - Forward
I suspect someone is looking very hard at that "Reply All" option and considering what can be done about it.
In fact, as I read left to right, I see the Reply option before the fateful Reply All. People who choose it are not picking the first option. They are picking one that is more strident.
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Even funnier that none of those downvotes bothered to deny it.
I mean, you just Teflonned me - you didn't deny it either!
But for the record, there has been an influx of negative AC posters since the US election, who I've had a few run ins with.
I just think a significant part of this site's newer membership is the emboldened, negative bots / trolls who sling out negativity without ever actually posting.
I can't prove or disprove that myself; I genuinely can't think of any other reasons I would get downvotes.
You sir, seem to have mistaken this website for some other site.
Here we lambast pretty much everyone, although usually from the technical point of view ("where's the IT angle") but not always as we don't want to restrict ourselves too much. Therefore we have articles pointing out holes (and making fun of) both Trump's useless website and email configuration and Clinton's personal email server.
I have years of NHS experience though not there at the moment.
I have vivid memories of our service desk being asked to create such dist lists.
There were arguments in the NHS over who was allowed to dictate the members. There were arguments about IT doing it.
I was management, I gave one of our lesser skilled deskers brief training on why dist lists containing dist lists that pointed at the original dist list.
I think common sense was and remains in short supply. It shouldn't surprise anyone that my overriding experience of the NHS was shock at lack of knowledge.
I have a copy of the full email here, it reads:
Subject: Testicle removal surgery.
Body: Dear sir / madam,
I'm pleased to inform you that the surgery to remove your left testicle [delete as appropriate] has been scheduled for 23rd December 2016 at 1pm. Please indicate by reply that this date is suitable for you. You must arrive at Southampton General [delete as appropriate] at least 4 hours before the appointed time, and you are reminded not to eat [delete as appropriate] in the 12 hours preceding the appointment and not to drink [delete as appropriate] for four (4) hours preceding the appointment.
Yours,
Mr Ivor Nicktoor Bolokov, Senior Surgical Consultant.
As an ex-IT professional I worked on the principle that there are no stupid users, only poor computer systems that don't protect users from their own stupidity. Yes, I was an idealist as well as a deep-rooted cynic.
I saw several of these email firestorms during my career at a major US institution, and on every occasion I looked at the original, thought "Dope!", just deleted it, and then sat back waiting for my imbecile coworkers to start with the "Please remove me".
Apparently I was alone in just taking the simple course of deletion. Duh...
"As an ex-IT professional I worked on the principle that there are no stupid users, only poor computer systems that don't protect users from their own stupidity."
This is the theory that systems should be made idotproof. Nature abhors an idiotproof system and responds by producing a new, improved idiot.
Why is it that those most prone to complaining about unwanted emails cluttering up their mailbox inevitably hit 'Reply to All' thus cluttering up everyone else's mailbox! An over developed sense of irony? Tragic lack of self-awareness? Or (as I suspect) is it just an unquenchable need to let other people know how busy and/or important they think they are.
It's the sort of situation that requires ritual humiliation.
Back in the days of character terminals we had MOTD set to remind users to log out. Inevitably there were those who didn't so the message got amended with "This includes you, xxxxxx", edited each time we caught an un-logged out user's name. It was effective in a remarkably short space of time although we were eventually asked to remove the last offender's name.
Maybe this is a case for an article in a newsletter explaining how it went wrong initially and then was made many times worse by the following people sending a reply to all....
And no, they can't complain about data protection. They outed themselves themselves.
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Anyone spotted this on the nhs.net support page
http://support.nhs.net/servicestatus
In the new portal features on the 13th December they added:
5981: Add users/contact from other organisations to a DL Distribution List owners may now add members, owner and authorised senders from any organisation, and not just their own.
Ooops.. maybe a feature they regret adding..
Just receiving emails from 11am now from legitimate senders of legitimate emails .. including two telling me that they couldn't attend my 11am call. I would like to apologise in advance for the email they probably haven't received yet asking why if they weren't going to be on the call they hadn't sent an apology in advance.
They'll probably have learned the hard way now : NHS staff are quite reliable at setting their 'out-of-office' assistant - so assuming that one-sixth of the NHS workforce is off work at any given time, each person who replied-all will have received about 200,000 OOH replies...
There are actually more than 1.2 million emails clogging up the NHS email system thanks to everyone who "replied-to-all" saying "Please remove me etc....". The Guardian says 186 million. Moral? Take a deep breath, ask why this is happening and put brain in gear before hitting that send button.
I work for a big company that recently had a reply all storm. The people who replied-all seemed to fall into a number of categories:
1. I'm really important, why are you bothering me with this. (Don't understand what's going on.)
2. Oh no, help! I don't know what's going on, will somebody please tell me whether this email is relevant to me. (Don't understand what's going on.)
3. Please fill in form A34/FD and follow procedure 3004/R4 if you want this email to be actioned. (Don't understand what's going on.)
4. Ha ha this is fun! (Understand what's going on.)
5. Please don't reply all. (Understand what's going on.)
At my place, this used to happen quite frequently. Fortunately, 'all' was only about a thousand addresses (assuming internal only - there were a couple that went out, they were a separate matter). Thing is, the COO (now departed) was a 4 on the above scale, so every couple of weeks you'd get an email from a dunce who hadn't used Bcc, swiftly followed by our most senior tech, also not using Bcc to publicly upbraid the dunce. To be fair, once nearly every one of the grunts had been humiliated, they didn't repeat their mistake, and the culture of cheerfully Ccing enormous distribution lists evaporated. But I do still have nearly 100 emails from said former COO, each with two sets of fancy schmancy signatures with graphics and social media links, clogging up my Outlook inbox (of course I could delete or archive, but I have principles). Given how few of our staff ever delete anything (we have folders last accessed over ten years ago), that's around 100,000 emails from a COO, Ccing everyone to tell them not to Cc everyone.
Every time this sort of thing happens I think that the person sending the mail is probably a bit of an idiot.
Words do not exist to describe the intelligence levels of those who feel it necessary to reply to an obvious cockup.
Every time this happened at work, I'd get the original mail and then hundreds of variations on "Did you mean to send this to me?", all of which seemed to come across as "Baaaaaaaaa".
not long after I started where I work now (back in 98) we had a not so nice mail loop. We were a Novell groupwise shop at the time. A user left and set a forward to their new email address at a Uni and then a forward back from that account to there still active account at our site! Oh the joy email totally bombed for days and as was quite common back then Groupwise sat on our main Netware server meaning that users couldn't login either as all the servers resources were taken by groupwise.
Once upon a time when I worked for <bit of civil service> I had an important, and fairly urgent, need to inform users of <thing> about something. (Can't recall exactly what now; it was many years ago!) and the only way I could reach them all quickly was by sending an email to "All Users" even though it would reach perhaps 500 - 800 "non - users". With an opening sentence of "if you are not a user of <thing> then you can delete this email at once and I apologise for having troubled you" or something of the sort.
I turned off Read Receipts, selected All Users and pressed Send. Two seconds later I got a rejection, so I walked 3 doors down the corridor to IT. "Ah; you don't have permission for that - you can have it but at your own risk".
What could possibly go wrong?
Back to my desk, set it all up again and pressed send. Within 10 seconds I realised my ghastly mistake; this time I had forgotten to turn Read Receipts off, and I was being bombarded with them. The bombardment was pretty intense for a couple of weeks, and some 4000 or so receipts were still coming in in ones and twos when I retired several months later, which didn't say much for the diligence with which some users checked their emails.
If nothing else it provided some innocent amusement for the IT personnel when I recounted the tale during one of the <very senior person's> Royal Progresses round his empire. On the plus side he was quite complimentary about the original email, and was as amused as everyone else about my self - inflicted misfortune...
"during one of the <very senior person's> Royal Progresses round his empire."
I've been through a number of those event. The disruption they caused. All work stopped. Clear the benches so we could stand the information boards on them. Thank goodness we lost them in the fire - the boards that is; we lost the benches as well but those were replaced.
I've been through a number of those event. The disruption they caused. All work stopped.
Fortunately he wasn't that type of <very senior person>; "standing on ceremony" wasn't required. He was very much a "JFDI" type, which suited me / us quite well.
Sorry I have to play grammarian fascist on THIS one:
"had understandably turned their mobile phone off"
it's either 'had understandably turned their mobile PHONES off' (referring to multiple people), or 'had understandably turned HIS mobile phone off' (for a single person whose actual sex is unknown, use of the MALE pronoun 'his' would be correct).
post edit: or it could've been a 'typoe'
Bollocks. It's a perfectly acceptable and long established usage. It was nuppits who tried to rewrite English grammatical rules based on those of a different language who introduced the idea that it isn't. If thou thinkest it wrong then please explain why the plural version of second person pronoun and verb is now almost invariably used for the singular.
For the idiots who always use "reply all". There are plenty of these, they don't seem to get the idea that you can just use "reply". And they can be joined by the ones who seem to assume that if an email is 1-to-many their reply also needs to be 1-to-many. The common example of this is the email that asks all an "if " question, as in "If any of you can help with x please email me.." and there well be then a flood of "reply all" emails from people who don't need to answer at all, because they can't help, saying that they can't help; which can be annoying enough even if there are only a dozen or so on the original list.
For the idiots who always use "reply all".
There are certain work environments where employees feel the need to document all interactions, no matter how trivial. I've witnessed conversations where one person sitting at a desk next to another will ask for details by email instead of just discussing it. These are the sort of people who default to Reply-All every single time. If something was said in an email and they need to reply, they *want* everyone in the chain to see their reply.
It's arse covering, Highly prevalent in local government and national govt. departments so I'd not be surprised at all that the NHS was the same. It happens in the private sector too, but seems a little less prevalent there. It seems to be indicative of a toxic work environment.
"The common example of this is the email that asks all an "if " question, as in "If any of you can help with x please email me.." and there well be then a flood of "reply all" emails from people who don't need to answer at all, because they can't help, saying that they can't help"
Amazon Marketplace has a feature whereby anyone can ask a question about a product, and Amazon then email those who have purchased the product, asking if they can answer the question; but the dumb and poorly-thought-out aspect of this is, that there is also an "I don't know" button. I have always felt the latter to be pointless, since any moderately intelligent person can infer that I don't know the answer from the fact that I don't give one.
To my mind, the only earthly use of this feature is that if someone asks a question about a Pink Floyd product, the "I don't know" option could be replaced with "I don't know, I was really drunk at the time".
"The common example of this is the email that asks all an "if " question, as in "If any of you can help with x please email me.." and there well be then a flood of "reply all" emails from people who don't need to answer at all, because they can't help, saying that they can't help"
I had manger ask the group if any one had skill X. Since I did not have skill X I did not respond. She got bent out of shape that I did not respond I did not have skill X. That's why you have people responding when they should not.
That is the thing. Even just a single reply to CroydonSurgeries rather than "reply all" would continue the madness. There were a few hitting "reply all" telling people not to "reply all". It was still getting stuff when I left an hour ago.Gets Croydon on the map I suppose. Someone's going to be working a lot later than I tonight, poor buggers.
"asking you why you didn't use the Bcc field and why everyone now has their email address,"
When I had transferred my Demon.co.uk email to Namesco Exchange Office 365 a few months ago - I sent out an email to several contacts to inform them that my email was up again. I used Bcc as a matter of habit.
Imagine my surprise when one of them replied saying that the email contained ALL the recipients' email addresses. I did a test using a message to my different domains - and sure enough Bcc via Office 365 was showing all the addresses to each recipient.
Today I discovered that Office 365 had also automatically invoked something it called "de-cluttering". Basically it decided that any emails I had read - then immediately deleted - were a sign of a "clutter" email. Thereafter it silently put new instances in an IMAP "clutter" folder rather than my "new mail" folder. That clutter folder now contained most of my eBay search or watched item monitoring emails plus a few order confirmations for several months. It took a while to find how to switch it off.
While finding the option I discovered several messages in the Admin control panel telling me that a wonderful replacement for "clutter" will be "in focus" to automatically prioritise my emails - to be rolled out this month. The messages had never been sent as emails to my POP3 folders.
Makes me want to go back to rolling my own domains and POP3 servers.
Bcc via Office 365 was showing all the addresses to each recipient.
That is unforgiveable, a security risk and probably explains some of the spam I've been getting to my domain recently; I, too, use Bcc when possible / appropriate. Thanks for that nugget.
M.
"Some users have experienced a short delay in the NHS mail system this morning. Action has been taken to resolve this issue."
By short delay, they mean the entire day that nobody in the office could access their nhs.net emails.
Grr @ stupid admin that test sent to all, and even more grr @ pillocks that think 'reply to all' is a good idea because they're soooo important they feel the rest of the NHS absolutely MUST know how irritated they are at receiving an email that says 'test'.
"pillocks that think 'reply to all' is a good idea because they're soooo important they feel the rest of the NHS absolutely MUST know how irritated they are at receiving an email that says 'test'."
"Test" as the message was (and is) a bad idea for testing emails.
Should have used "Only idiots reply to this message."
The Helpdesk for NHS Mail is based in India. A friend's response to a call to them when the problem started resulted in a suggestion that there was a problem with the ISP and that they should email in a screenshot of the problem. No amount of explaining that the email was down so he couldn't email in a screenshot got him anywhere. Well, at least an Indian support desk is cheap!
Ah, happy memories. Must have been 15 or more years ago and I worked for....a certain national broadcasting company a stone's throw from Shepherd's Bush in London.
Some secretary somewhere, bless her heart, seriously, she was going to trek across the South Pole, and all for a Good Cause.
I think she probably asked her manager if she could "Send an email round" asking for sponsorship. And probably he said "Of course, good for you!". There followed her artful bit of shift-clicking to select the entire global address list, and a heartfelt plea sent to thousands of mailboxes.
Not as many users as the current NHS fracas I guess, but nonetheless including everyone from Broadcast in Bristol to the Newsdesk in Nairobi.
So it's late-shift on the User Admin service desk, the most excitement one could hope for was maybe resetting Zoe Ball's password (yes I did once).... I'm naively chuckling at this message sent to Everyone, and then I watch with dawning horror as the Reply Alls start to come in...
It wasn't too bad at first, a few encouraging "Jolly good for you!" and "I'm in for 5 quid" replies...but when it all went south (haha) was when some Wag replied with a mocking message along lines of "Ooh, I'm so good and clever, please give me a gold star made of real gold, everyone look at me" etc.
Then of course some right-minded folks had to upbraid him for his uncharitable (literally) attitude.
Then some other Wags had to jump in, commend his Waggishness, and add more Waggishness of their own to the fray.
And all Reply-All, Ad Infinitum, of course.
Our turn-of-the-century Exchange servers had blocked queues for ...a day at least? Seemed longer at the time...
But the Microsoft Mail servers, as I recall an email header with >256 characters simply crashed the server. That took a little longer to sort out. Probably some of those users are still waiting on their emails even today.
For years afterwards, mention of the "South Pole Incident" would cause email admins to clutch their lunchtime pints with white knuckles and mutter something like "if that happens again I'm moving to the South Pole meself"....
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Because MS introduced Mailtips in 2007 which, if enabled and done correctly* would warn people that they're about to send an email to everyone/recipients that are on the list outside of their organisation/to a large number of recipients etc etc etc
*Yes...I know that's a rarity for many places, not just public sector.
They should consider themselves lucky.
What if the original message had been sent requesting DELIVERY confirmation back to the list?
850k x 850k messages all hitting the system at once. Would make 3 hour delays on email look like luxury!
Just saying.
(Saw this on a netware system back in 1990. Nasty mess)
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