Compression? What's that? And why is the network congested and the PCs frozen? There's nothing like a bit of schadenfreude to ease the pain of re-entering the working week, which is why The Reg kicks off every Monday morning with an installment of Who, Me? in which readers share tales of tech support gone not so well. Hopefully it will make you feel better about yourselves. This week's legit hero is a …
Did anyone else have a mental image of Vivian being similar to the Vivian from "The Young Ones", complete with metal studs in his forehead? Granted, not the type to be personal assistant to anyone, especially as nobody would probably dare give him a stern talking to about anything.
I'd better be going. The black leather jacket today
Exact detail escapes me, but it was early to mid 2000's. My school teacher sister used Office 2000's PowerPoint to make a presentation and generated a 900+ Mb file. She was telling me that most of her colleagues were complaining that they couldn't open it, it was freezing their computers. I was all "hmm" until I saw the file she gave them. She could open it (made her Pentium-D with 512M RAM computer sluggish with pagefile use) but other people had older PCs. They were bitmap images... Microsoft's garbage generators, in the wrong hands, will happily let you do things like that.
I believe I've posted this anecdote here before, but it's still funny and bears repeating.
An old, old friend of mine, who shall remain nameless, was responsible for writing drivers at a now-defunct network hardware company in the early 2000s.
Because the build/compile process could in some circumstances take considerable time, he wrote a script that would perform the build overnight after he left, then e-mail him the resulting compiler log, so that he could verify its success or otherwise before he even arrived at the office. "Work Smarter Not Harder", right?
Anyway, one morning he arrived at work to find the site IT team waiting for him in the lobby, metaphorically holding spiked baseball bats.
His overnight build process had failed and logged the result; due to the way he'd written the script, it had then tried to build the driver again, failed, logged the result... and so on, again and again and again.
When the logging process failed due to lack of local disk space, his script had proceeded to its next stage - and e-mailed the log file to him.
This being simpler times, his employer's email system had choked on a 4 gigabyte attachment, and keeled over. Hard. Bringing down e-mail for a large part of the company, worldwide.
Pint for my friend --->
Experienced similar in recent years, got called over to look at why some PC was taking forever to load a PDF email attachment, it was urgent as they needed to sign it off urgently.
After a little looking then being allowed to hands on and ask some questions, discovered the attachment was in fact a link and they were trying to download a 600MB pdf file, which adobe was then trying to load into memory and display…
The file was the prepress version of a 3m banner they were having printed, the printer had sent it over for inspection and approval. Naturally, having downloaded it Adobe was trying to condense the file so it could generate a screen image for a 1080p monitor…
Only a couple of months ago I had to help my wife out with a similar problem. She was trying to make a presentation and had a page with 50-odd photos on it, timed to appear at half-second increments, and (for some strange reason) the animation timings weren't working properly. I had to explain that even though they looked pretty small on the screen each photo was still the original high quality full image, a large amount of data, and the computer simply wasn't able to load them in time.
I wound up pasting all the photos onto a black background, saving that as a single image, and using that as a background on the presentation, with 50-odd black ovals timed to disappear at half-second intervals. Didn't look quite as good (the original background was textured, and some traces of the picture edges were faintly visible), but I had less than an hour to get it sorted and then select and add a music track behind it, so I did what I could in the time available. The presentation size shrank from several hundred MB to under 8 MB, and it all worked quite nicely.
Indeed! Vivian Stanshall was my immediate thought, mostly because it's the first masculine usage of the name that I had encountered (in Canada here I've only seen it a girl's name).
"... all the beautiful people..." heheh
Another one I love is the "11 mustachioed daughters" (with his own named band "Vivian Stanshall's Big Grunt")
I had a client that decided to email some data over just as they headed home (to populate a database), all 3 Gb of it.
my own mail server sat at the end of an adsl connection, a solution what had never been an issue before with it having about 4mb of bandwidth.
Their server started delivering the mail and mine was accepting it, slow but it should get there after about an hour of using all available bandwidth.
After 20 minutes their server started resending the email (retry as the email hadn't been sent)
1st copy will now complete in 80 minutes
2nd copy will take 100 minutes
20 mins later their server tries again etc etc
By the next morning my mail server was on it's knees with no disk space remaining in the partition used for mailbox storage (every attempt at sending had allocated 3gb of disk space) and at this stage there were 42 incoming mail connections from their server with none showing any sign of completing this year.
Their mail server wasn't fairing much better, each retry had generated an email back to them warning them that the email had not been delivered and was being resent (with the original email as an attachment), this had quite quickly taken them over their mailbox size limit which then meant that their server was sending itself failure notices about that (still with the attachment) which was then generating even more failure notices.
The aftermath took the rest of the day to sort out at both ends (mine was fairly simple as I just took smtp offline and wiped the queue), theirs was more complicated as they were struggling to get a connection in to manage the server.
Final outcome was that they imposed a 200mb attachment size limit and changed their retry limit from infinite to 4 times and increased the retry delay to 1 hour - 3 hours - 6 hours - 24 hours
Best of it was that the data they were sending over was the data I had already pulled a copy of from their production database.
Those are the stories that demonstrate how we got to where we are now. Better management of email is, just like laws about security, due to the abysmal failures of existing procedures.
The eggheads who thought of email management (back in the day where a 10MB hard disk cost a huge chunk of money) didn't think about the real world, they just thought that a message should never be lost - and that's how the Real WorldTM lost plenty of messages.
Nowadays, we have servers with terabytes of disk space, and we still limit message size to a very reasonable 10MB. If you have more than that to send, you can arrange for a shared cloudy thing and not bother the email server with it.
But that takes experience, and experience always means experiencing failure and finding out why.
It does as much as can be done in that situation. If they're retrieving a file over HTTP, it will adjust to the speed of their connection, and in nearly all cases, including most cloud services, it can be resumed rather than restarted if the connection breaks.
A point-to-point transfer would be better in some cases, but it too would not deal with the problem of a link that takes too long. It can also be more difficult to set up for the uninitiated, and depending on the protocol in use, more fragile.
Security & Privacy. Even an SD card in the post might be safer, but even before websites we had FTP as the alternate to email for actual files. SFTP is still better than a Web GUI to upload/down content with my hosting.
Packet loss can be high with pigeons.
Also loads of people don't have decent broadband. Using my custom cabled "off-site" backup is 10x faster than my fibre upload speed. Some datacentres accept "upload" by physical device.
I won't be increasing my email size limits, chosen 20 years ago.
Some organisations, generally councils, don't except WeTransfer. They quote security reasons. Suggests that they don't scan any downloads for viruses or malware.
Whenever I have to submit a S38 submission, it usually ends up in the +20MB range of multiple PDF drawings that gets put on a 64GB USB (cheaper to get that size as we also use them for CCTV videos of sewers that get sent to the water authorities) and mailed in.
At least the councils don't ask for the printouts (in multiples) anymore.
That's no good here, for security reasons USB file transfer is disabled on almost all our computers.
This is because teachers have a tendency to copy data to USB and lose it between school and home, which isn't ideal.
Also, kids have a habit of bringing in USBs with portable VPNs exposing our network to all kinds of shite from online game sites
Err... why, oh why, didn't they use SyPest... err, SyQuest media or CD-Rs or, if available, Zip or Jaz media? Many was the multi GB dataset which I broke up using segmented ZIP or RAR and PAR and dumped to SyPest 44MB/88MB/larger or to CD-R (600 to 800 MB) or to Iomega Zip (100 MB or 250 MB) or Jaz (1 GB or 2 GB) media in the 1990s. CD-Rs and SyPest were available in 1991 or so, Zip and Jaz a bit later (the sonic boom you heard was the world dumping SyPest as quickly as possible once Zip and Jaz were available, most people hated SyPest with the fury of 10,000 suns). Or, if they didn't want to use physical media and sneakernet, why not set up a FTP site? Emailing it would be the absolutely last thing that I would do, precisely because I would expect it to kill the server. Personally, I would have RARed and PARed it and stuck it on the FTP, 3 GB is a bit much to sneakernet 100 MB at a time. I used to get a box of SyPests and later Zips or Jazes FedExed in with a few hundred MB to a GB or so of data on a regular basis, or directions to a FTP site to go collect it.
Don't usually have size or bandwidth issues, but most offices don't have scanners, so they take documents and use a public all in one printer to scan and email the document as an attachment. one user sent a document to herself and complained that after 40 minutes she still couldn't see the the attachment. It being scanned by Microsoft for malware before it would release the attachment to be viewed or saved by the user. She have 4 documents sent and not being available by that time.
I once worked on a project for an insurance company.
You could tell it was "old economy" (when "new economy" was A Thing) by that the in-house physical mail distribution was often faster than email (the former was darn efficient while the latter suffered from some error in the bowels of Lotus Notes on mainframe, IIRC).
So when things were moderately urgent, I wrote the data on one of the individually numbered, signed-for 3.5 inch floppy disks, turned on the "I have mail to pick up" light, and within minutes the mailman collected said disk and brought it from my 20th floor office to IT on 3rd floor. When they were really urgent, I took the service elevator myself.
A friend's daughter sent him a photo from her work, all 30MB of it, and he only had a dial up modem! Inevitably this blocked all his incoming email* so he called his unofficial support, i.e. me (payment used to be made in bottles of decent Scotch :) ).
Fortunately I immediately spotted what was happening and was able to delete the message from the mailbox as I dread to think how long it would have taken to download.
*He was a local councillor and sat on several committees so this was a significant issue.
Depends on the modem and connection. Back when I had 56k dialup, 52k speeds wasn't that unusual, so under 10 mins :-)
Even a 14k4 modem should manage it in a little under half an hour, but in the era of 14k4 modems, about 1990, consumer digital cameras were just arriving and were not likely to produce images of 30MB. I think my first digital camera was 1.3Mpixels and used 4MB SD cards for multiple photos :-)
Oh, look: sendmail is not running. "startsrc -s sendmail" (yes, that OS. VIOS, actually).
3
2
1
Guess what, there is a limit how much mail a sophos mail gateway can process. I really should have checked how much there was in the queue beforehand. Took the team a few hours to clear the queue and cost me a few beer.
Around about the same time as Vivian's escapade (judging from the use of 486es) I had a near identical experience which I think I've recounted here before. In this case it was an ad-hoc dial-up MS Mail system with low-spec "mail servers" at each site (I think there were six or seven sites at the time) and local networking on 10Mbps thin Ethernet with a four-port isolating hub in the middle. If memory serves correctly, our mail server was a '286 with 1MB RAM and a 40MB HDD running DOS6.
One of the sites had a new logo which a manager scanned as a glorious 24bit black and white TIFF (or might have been a BMP) and emailed to everyone, everywhere. Fortunately the system only sent one copy over the dial-up link, but distributing 10MB each to a mixed bag of 4MB 486SX, 486DX and even one 1MB 386SX took two or three hours out of everyone's working morning. Manager escaped with nothing more than a terse email from higher-ups.
Later that year a sales wag sent an email containing a topical joke. Nothing particularly offensive, only a couple of kB, delivered in a couple of minutes, but because it was again to "everyone everywhere" he got a final written warning.
M.
Not too many years later (early pentonian :) a local user sent 300Mb document to 300 odd local recipients, the local server slowed down bit and not receiving a copy of his own email sent it again, and then again.* Shutdown the mail service and let the local MXer queue incoming email then some serious clearing of the mail queue with postsuper and some nasties on users' inboxes (thankfully Maildir/.)
Back then users were only familiar with floppy based sneakernet and email for exchanging files so there wasn't a really a limit set on the mail sizes for internal senders. After this episode 20Mb.
* the first two were forgivable, a third less so.
I told a customer I could read vcd/evidence files. The customer sends me a 750Mb vcd file
It killed the office email system. The office manager got the email queue deleted. I only had the email addresses in the queue.
I had to email each customer on the email list apologise and ask them to resend the email.
Most embarrassing.
In the early days of PDF documents, someone created a questionnaire, with a few boxes to tick, and had lots of glossy photographs, so the PDF was large. This was emailed out. It filled my inbox space (but I ran at 90% full anyway) We duly ticked the boxes and sent the document back. The originator had not planned on getting 100 large documents back in email, and their mail box filled up. They panicked and purged lots of these emails.
As a result they had to resend the original document by sending us a link, and in the email asked us to answer the following questions.... The originator had to eat humble pie, especially when people asked why we needed all the photos, wasting their time creating the PDF, and wasting our time having to read it.
Before I organised a commercial FTTP link for our local 4 Parishes, we had problems with the local Secondary School which served them.
Teachers would send out work as PDF (if we were lucky) or more often PowerPoint files. These would take approximately all night!, to download at <900Kbps (often much slower if it had been raining), but were impossible to upload with the answers at approx. 10KBps!
Eventually, the Head Mistress relented and allowed the answers to be brought back into school on a USB stick (despite the security implications), but insisted that everyone should have decent Internet access despite all the evidence to the contrary (and some families not having computers). I never did ask if she was in cahoots with BT who refused to update our links despite BDUK money to do so and our Parishes claiming the top 4 spots in the County Councils 'broadband upgrade needs surveys' on the first 2 times they were run.
I used to work for a company that was purchased by a huge US globocorp.
Soon after the purchase, all our servers were migrated to the globocorp's European base in Sofia, and our email accounts were integrated into the globocorps system, which is when the fun happened.
Someone in the US sent a message to all staff, instead of all the staff in their office, so instead of about 100 recipients, the email had 250,000 recipients.
Naturally, someone then clicked "reply all", then someone else and within about 15 minutes then entire global network ground to a halt as the links between the US, Sofia and Tokyo were all crammed with a reply all email storm.
It took 3 whole days for the network to recover, and the icing on the cake is that this company's entire network was down just as they were starting to do some quite important work for a secretive US three-letter agency in the middle east.
Soon after, the Reply All button stopped being the default on our email app.
Anonymous because of the aforementioned three-letter agency...
Bloody Microsoft's Outlook app has "reply all" as a default.I can't understand why anyone thought that a good idea. I'm sure it's not the only one. I wonder how much time is wasted by reading email replies from one person back to another that also went to every other recipient. Especially annoying when they're the unneeded negative ones that shouldn't even have been sent.
"If anyone can cover Wednesday afternoon's slot could you let me know" followed by the entire office getting loads of messages saying, "Sorry I'm busy Wednesday".
Especially when you weren't the correct person in the email chain...
I'm sure someone got around to eventually fixing that aircon fault in the City of London... nice large pics of those floor mounted fans clustered round the comms cabinet to keep it working though
Got a common name with no middle initial... got to know most of the guys with the same name over the years, to the point that I could reply with the correct person for most of them
I have a very UNcommon first name that I share with one other person in our nearing 1000 people company. Our last names are VERY different (not even starting with the same letter) yet somehow I regularly get emails addressed to him. Some even with rather personal data from his team lead that REALLY shouldn't be sent to anyone else. It's baffling how many people just go for the first name that pops up in the auto-suggested list.
“It's baffling how many people just go for the first name that pops up in the auto-suggested list.”
I work p/t in the school my wife teaches in; emails are surname initial @<school>.net. Since p/t staff were given email accounts I now occasionally receive emails that begin “Hello miss. Regarding the homework you set…”. As we’re [correctly] expected not to interact with students it’s easier to fwd them onto her at the other end of the settee, tempting though it is to reply directly with a sarcastic comment.
My email is a.gre....@ etc
Our Chair of Governors is a.ger....@ etc
The number of emails I get with very confidential information that was meant for the Chair, I've learnt to skim emails from certain people then forward them on as soon as I see shit I should see.
I often wonder if the Chair gets emails from data and exams networks...
Similar-ish situation here. The exams officer and a teacher shared a very common initial/surname (along the lines of j.smith) but the teacher, who arrived a few years later than the exams officer, felt she was entitled to the "better" email address (j.smith instead of smith.j, say). She kicked off and the Head overruled my warnings about the potential confusion and insisted that I swap their email addresses.
The inevitable confusion followed but eventually died down.
A few months later, the teacher was sent confidential download links for exam materials relating to her subject, which she duly circulated in the department. The exams officer didn't twig that there was a problem until closer to the exam, when she realised that hadn't yet had the files she needed through. Needless to say, the exam board were not at all happy that some of the content from the forthcoming GCSE exam had gone astray...
Anything that is "very confidential" shouldn't be being sent by email anyway, as email isn't end-to-end encrypted, and so every server en route has access to the message contents (unless you are one of the 94 people on the planet who actually know how to correctly install, set up, and use GPG - and I'll freely admit that I'm not one of them!)
...and this is why schools round here use non-named accounts on shared mailboxes for things like the office, the exams officer, the chair of governors etc...
Still doesn't solve the issue around similar names, which crops up more often than you might expect - it seems that many teachers work in the same school as their spouse!
I was in a similar position at a software company. A high wizard developer and I (ops) shared most of our names.
I didn’t need to get a handful of unit test results from the wrong department, every few days, with the occasional multi recipient email on the other days, or putting my email in the output for a jenkins job (_jesus_) *never mind* taking friendly fire when they mixed up our proxy logs and gave me a racking to avoid so much time on … $video site? maybe?
It was some site I did not use whatsoever, and I was puzzled for a moment until it clicked and I pointed out the different last initial at the end of our (incredibly short) usernames.
Fortune (hah) had me sitting next to the CTO, a kindly BOFH. I ended up asking if I could just use my nickname for a username and internal email, which worked nicely. He had a good laugh over that. Took a box of doughnuts for the mail admin and it was done.
When you have people who insist on bad subject lines, sometimes you need it:
Re: Request
Alice, please consider this a high priority request. It is important.
-Bob
Hopefully, you only have one email with the subject line "Request". Even if you do, you may have to delve into your history to find it. But what happens if you have two of them. How do you figure out which one is the important request and which one isn't supposed to happen at all? You could guess based on which one looks more probable. You could contact Bob, but maybe Bob has left for the day which is why he asked you to do it. You could open the headers and see if there is a commonality you can use. If Bob replied all, then probably you could use the other recipients to find out.
Yes, it also causes problems, but sometimes it is necessary.
I've said it before and I'll repeat it now: "Reply all" email storms are one of the most magnificent spectacles of nature!
They tell a lot about the infrastructure of the affected organization, and say a lot more about the psyche of the people who go out of their way to reply all telling other people *not* to reply all, and of those who unleash the most outlandish threats against the people involved.
Whenever something like this happens (less frequently now than in days of yore) I can abandon all I am doing to monitor the incoming emails, reading and laughing at the answers, and noticing how the network starts to buckle under the load.
Fun for all ages indeed
I once got a great email about data security from a professional body.
The email was extolling the importance of using BCC for emails sent to many people outside your organisation.
The best part is every single person receiving the email was in the To: field, all 1,500 of us, with all those email addresses exposed in the body text of the first Reply All email sent...
This was not Outlook (or LookOut, as we called it) but it did involve Powerpoint (point applied with power to certain areas). We were a smallish company of about 60 people. Head of Marketing sent out a 40-page Powerpoint file to 6 people. Each recipient made a minor change and replied to all. This continued recursively until mail slowed to a crawl.
On a slightly related note wherein mail servers become overwhelmed due to user actions, on this day October 14th way back in 1997 the legendary Bedlam DL 3 reply-all mail storm occurred at Microsoft (google can find you several accounts thereof). A classic example showing that you don't really need huge uncompressed attachments in your mails to make things grind to a halt. You only need users who have great development potential in understanding how email systems work.
For various reasons (mainly 'cos we could, I think) we had a couple of IBM 6150s running AIX 2.2.<something>, hard wired (probably RS422, not 232), one forwarding mail to the other (which was a gateway to places Beyond The Woods We Know). Using UUCP, as we were also delivering mail to selected customers via dial-up modem. Very occasionally we goofed the config a bit, resulting in basically a mail loop. Didn't slow the servers down as such, until the disk filled up...
Fortunately we were a small company (at the time) so the end result was usually just a bit of name calling and taking the piss. Stopped using UUCP (in house at least) once we built a decent in-house network and had good TCP/IP tools for PC (anybody remember the Beame & Whiteside TCP stack for DOS/Windows?)
This happened sometime in the mid 2000s
The company I worked for had someone in the coloured pencil department decide that they wanted to send a movie file to all the customers - over a million of them they could have put the (I think) 10mb file on a server so it could be downloaded- nope they attached it directly to the email.
It resulted in the company being put on multiple spam blacklists which is rather a big problem for an insurance broker sending documentation by email when someone takes a policy out.
For me it didn’t cause that big an impact. It others spent weeks trying to fix the carnage caused.
How dare you sully the good name of BMP!
In the file version supported by Windows 3.1 it definitely supported Run-Length Encoding (RLE) compression. One of my first tasks as a junior dev back in the 90s was writing a BMP encoder and the letters "RLE" still trigger a small shiver of horror even today. Admittedly, RLE would likely not do much with a noisy digital photo but was usually at least somewhat helpful with simple clipart etc
> Same here with my 486/33. GIF files until then were instantaneous on screen
And yet, GIF has a Progressive (interlaced) mode that slots blotchy and slowly smooths-out. On an aging '286/12, that was helpful.
Also, 256 colors was a LOT on displays of the day. EGA tended to 64 colors max unless double-option upgraded. (Yes, the vast majority of EGA clones shipped with more RAM than IBM gave you.)
> Also, 256 colors was a LOT on displays of the day. EGA tended to 64 colors max unless double-option upgraded. (Yes, the vast majority of EGA clones shipped with more RAM than IBM gave you.)
Most 486s had VGA or better. My. XT clone had EGA. I can't recall any 486s with less than 256 colour VGA.
> And yet, GIF has a Progressive (interlaced) mode that slots blotchy and slowly smooths-out.
Can you explain how that works? GIF uses LZW encoding for compression (which is how it wound up patent encumbered) a stream compression algorithm that is strictly linear, and does not store the symbol table (it regenerates it from the stream). I can't think of a way in which progressive decode could be made to work and my searches yield nothing but animated gifs on decoding :-)
JPEG does have a progressive decode mode, provided it was encoded to support it. H.264 too has a fast path that yields a 1/4 resolution image useful for Picture in Picture type scenarios.
> Can you explain how that works?
No; but Wikipedia tries to. They separate compressions from progressive display because, of course, they are different.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GIF#Interlacing
"Interlacing
"The GIF Specification allows each image within the logical screen of a GIF file to specify that it is interlaced; i.e., that the order of the raster lines in its data block is not sequential. This allows a partial display of the image that can be recognized before the full image is painted.
An interlaced image is divided from top to bottom into strips 8 pixels high, and the rows of the image are presented in the following order:
Pass 1: Line 0 (the top-most line) from each strip.
Pass 2: Line 4 from each strip.
Pass 3: Lines 2 and 6 from each strip.
Pass 4: Lines 1, 3, 5, and 7 from each strip.
The pixels within each line are not interlaced, but presented consecutively from left to right. As with non-interlaced images, there is no break between the data for one line and the data for the next. The indicator that an image is interlaced is a bit set in the corresponding Image Descriptor block."
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/6/6d/Interlaced_GIF_demo.gif/210px-Interlaced_GIF_demo.gif
Email has been the source of so many exciting failures over the years but this one was one my favorites - at least looking back. An assistant for one of the C-Suiters was going on holiday so she kindly set an out of office reply on her email account. All was well until a company wide message was sent out. Her mailbox dutifully replied to all which, of course, included her email address, so off goes another reply all to her reply to all. Rinse, lather, repeat until there are hundreds of employees calling the help desk because they are receiving her out of office message about every 20 seconds, then 40, then 120, then the email system got oh so very quiet as it keeled over from the weight. I was one of the email sysadmins and we had a bit of a time coaxing the server, Exchange with some Lotus Notes on the side, back into submission and with a level of stability long enough to disable the out of office on her account and start the cleanup.
After this fun on a Friday (why is it always a Friday?) access control lists were enabled and very few people were allowed to send out all staff messages. The admin assistant came back from her holiday none the wiser until the dirty looks in the elevator, sorry the lift, set the tone for everyone eyeing her warily. We purposely left the hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of messages in her mailbox for her to cleanup. A small price to pay on the server's disk space. I doubt she ever forgot that lesson.....but you never know.
To this day, I am bewildered by the fact that so few people know what the BCC: line is for.
I don't know if the system has been changed, but at one time I'm fairly sure that if you added a link to a Mastodon message, each Mastodon server would try to download the page to get a preview image, which was effectively a DDoS for websites with limited data allowances
Doh. This reminds me of the annoyingly-still-too-prevelant habit of people using three-mile wide images as avatar photos *DISPLAYED* one inch across instead of *RESIZED* to one inch across. You see them when the download stutters and they are displayed filling the entire screen, until a few more bytes of the document arrives and they get redisplayed.
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Late 90's. Cartoon animation (flash, I think) of a snowman eating a child. A full day of chaos as user after user decided that 'everyone' just had to see it... our exchange server was not in any way sized to handle that.
After that, the 'all users' mailing list got restricted really quick....
I have lost count the number of times over the years a Manager or C-level came rushing over to request I recall an email that was sent, only to give me a "you are useless" look when I point out that I can only recall ones that have not already been read and I can recall ones that went to external email addresses, as we have no control over those.
Unfortunately I can't very well say to them, no matter how much I would like to "Maybe double check everything before sending the email"
It was back in the 90s. A young and somewhat cocky tech support person had joined. Hearing about macro viruses in the then newish Word 6.0, He prepared an email describing the risks, liberally sprinkled with screenshots/illustrations and the like and sent it to everyone. We were at multiple sites so the cascade of mail servers falling over took a few minutes. There was even some poor sod working in an office in the Caribbean with a 2400b/s dial up. It took the best part of 3 days to get the email back to normal.
And the ironic twist being that we hadn't yet upgraded from Word 2.0.
Small stock trading house in the latter 90's, an ISDN line, and the IT guy - who happened to be the brother of the owner - getting canned. for running a porno BBS on the side with their ridiculously "fat" internet pipe.
As they no longer had an IT guy, the shop I worked for at the time got called in to see why email stopped working.
Everything stalled at a certain message. Outlook Express would never finish downloading. We did not have direct access to the email server so couldn't delete the offending message, much less see it.
Office '97 had just come out and the shop had a copy for wrangling all those financial spreadsheets, so eventually we got the email credentials from the owner, configured Outlook, and sat back for a bit to wait for the trouble message to download.
Turned out the fired brother decided to fling a last finger at his sibling, and had sent an 18 meg or so video of a gal from Mexico with a horse.
Ugh.
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