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Technology Stocks : How high will Microsoft fly? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: taxman who wrote (22341)	5/7/1999 7:01:00 PM
From: RTev	Respond to of 74651

OT: A long weekend note about spam and the reaction to it. I heard of this a few years ago. It's an interesting tech-gone-awry story (that might not be as off-topic as it seems) that brings up a question we face here and on any other message board about what is worse: spam or the reaction to it. There once was this high tech company with thousands of employees, all of whom were connected together (of course) on the company's email system. This outfit had a small group over in a corner whose job it was to be sure the company email system worked as efficiently as possible. We'll call them e-test. Here's were the problem begins, however: Like most such systems, this company's email servers allowed for the creation of what were popularly called "aliases". Very useful things as we all know. Someone at the e-test group was assigned the task of determining just how big an alias could be. It wasn't something that could be determined on a closed test system, so e-test decided to create a massive alias on the production email system. They successfully created a list with many thousands of names. Maybe it was an oversight, but they gave everyone on the list write access to it. That wouldn't have been a problem except that some anal-retentive soul out there who probably liked to keep things neat and orderly went searching through the list of aliases to which he was subscribed and found the unknown list. He called it up and typed in a message something like this: "I see I'm on this alias but I didn't subscribe to it. What is it? Why am I on it?" That was a mistake -- as he would soon learn -- since he sent his message not to the list administrator, but to all the thousands of people on the alias. But the real problem started when folks began to reply to the original message. Hundreds and then thousands of "Me too" messages started pouring onto the servers and into mailboxes. They were soon followed by hundreds of messages sent to the whole alias scolding people for sending replies to the whole alias, followed by humorous replies pointing out how absurd it is to reply-all saying 'Don't Reply-All'. Of course, we know what happened. Bedlam. Much of the company's email system ground to a halt. E-test got a much better stress test than they'd ever hoped to see. Oh. And yes. That company's CEO was on the test alias.