Re: Net send
Microsoft Mail
Had a similar thing happen many years ago when the group of companies I the worked for installed MS Mail. I may well have related the story here previously.
Bearing in mind that up until this point the office where I was based boasted the grand total of (IIRC) four "PC" computers and a minicomputer with text terminals, we'd just installed a bunch of mostly '486SX machines with (mostly) 4MB RAM and 100MB (I think) HDDs, all networked with thin Ethernet to a "mail server" which was (again, IIRC) a 286 with 1MB RAM and a 40MB HDD.
Mail was distributed by dial-up modem directly site-to-site, so limited to 28k8. There was a "gentleman's agreement" that once a connection was made, mail could be sent in both directions but of course over standard phone lines, the cost was with the originating modem.
One day, the new computers seemed to "freeze" on bootup. It took a good couple of hours for the first of them to become responsive, and it turned out that the reason was a single email sent to "everyone, everywhere" by the MD of one of the other sites, notifying us of their snazzy new logo, which he had scanned at high resolution and attached - as a 10MB file - to the email. It may only have been transferred once (the system was "intelligent" like that), but the impact of a dozen or more clients trying to download it near simultaneously from the '286 over 10Mb Ethernet was entirely predictable.
Oh, and then there was the phone bill to consider.
Snotty email from big bosses and promises to be careful next time.
Then, one April 1st, some low-rank wag decided to send a text-only joke to "everyone, everywhere" and despite it not clogging everything up for hours and actually being reasonably amusing, received a written warning.
M.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
