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Midimusic.org.uk Computer Humour, Networks

3.2 Email Magic

Email is one of the most popular applications of computer networks. It's yet another item that the general public raves about but doesn't really understand.

Tech Support through email:

We're only allowed to reply through email, so I almost deleted it. But I reconsidered.

The following letter was received, through email, mind you, to a friend of mine:

Apparently I have read-only access with the email, but my boss would like me to be able to send messages as well. Is there any way this can be established with my account?

When I started working here, I got myself all the computer accounts I needed, including an email account. I was given my passwords for all systems except email. After about a week, I called up the appropriate person to find out what the problem was and was told that my password had been emailed to me.

A customer was inquiring about the features of a certain machine. Among his questions was, "Does it come with an email?"

There was no return address on the email, and the Reply-To: field was set to 'mail'.

I had a user say that the email messages she was trying to send would come back undeliverable. I went to her machine to take a look. The two messages in her out basket had valid email addresses in the To: line, but the text of her message was stored in the Cc: and Bcc: lines.

This user had been using the same computer and the same email program for over a year.

Doing phone support for a software company, we had a customer that needed an update to our program. We told her that we had placed it in her mailbox, and it was there waiting on her to pick it up (our customers had "mailboxes" on our dial up server). She told us it wasn't there, so we asked her to check again just to be sure. She said ok, put the phone down, and was gone for about five minutes. Finally she came back and said, "It's still not there. I knew it wouldn't because our postman only comes around 11:00am." She had walked outside and checked her street mailbox.

The company I work for recently sent out (completely voluntary) customer information cards, asking for the customer's name, home address, and email address. On more than one card, the email address field was filled in with the word "same" and an arrow pointing to the home address field.

I have a user who still insists that he should not have to dial in to get his remote e-mail. The computer should just know to turn it on. When he asked if the other remote users in the company knew this, I said, "Well, I have never had this question before." He accused me of calling him stupid and proceeded to call his manager to complain about our service. His manager laughed him off the phone and signed him up for training.

I run a mailing list. Like most others, it's set up so if you send email to the list with "unsubscribe" in the message, you'll be unsubscribed from the mailing list automatically.

I should tell you how many times I've seen "unsubscribe" spelled. People get so mad at me because "it doesn't work right" when they fail to realize that they've misspelled "unsubscribe." This is a quote from one such person, who wasn't even consistent:

The following was received via email from a customer:

Dear Help Desk:

Hmmm. This appeared in my inbox as I was writing you about Outbox trouble. So, apparently that email sat in my outbox BUT was also delivered... so I just BET the computer thinks I was sending it from the LS Mailbox, whence mail DOES sit in the outbox even if it was delivered. That was a forwarding of a message which had ORIGINALLY come into the LS mailbox BUT I had moved it into MY inbox before forwarding. I guess the computer remembered where it had originally arrived, does that make sense? This is this not a PAB problem but a Shared Inbox thing, a feature not a bug?

Cut directly from our support log:

> jim, when i send e-mail! do i use ink, like if i was writing? i
> had to put in new ink in
> my printer, so i was wondering if e-mail use'es ink.
> thank you

A client brought his PC into the office. "Eudora just doesn't work!" he complains. The tech opened Eudora. Five minutes later it opened. He had about 200 letters minimized.

Small wonder. It turned out, the user had 30,000 messages in his email box."

This morning someone came barging into my office, panic stricken, and frantic. "All my mail I saved in one of my folders is gone!!!" she said. I asked her which folder she had saved it to. "Deleted Items," she said.

A few months ago we had panicked users stating that they couldn't get to their mail and were getting error messages. Lo and behold, the mail directory had been moved to our server. (We use a single database oriented mail system.) When we went into the console to find out where, when, and who moved the mail directory, we found that it had been moved by a user. (Users need full read, write, and modify access to the mail folder beause it is a shared database -- a setup like this is itself a computer stupidity.) When questioned why she did this, she replied, "The network needed cleaning up."

Someone here at work, who just couldn't grasp the big picture of computers and computer networks, had something go wrong with his workstation and, for the day, had to use a different one in another lab. When he read new email from the second workstation, he replied, "How did you know what machine to send it to?"

I once had a customer call me up wanting to send something via email. She said no matter what she did it wouldn't go through. After much debating over the settings, I finally asked her what she was trying to send. It turned out she was trying to email a box to her daughter for her birthday. I still haven't quite figured out how she thought that would work.

When I was setting up a service call with Apple computer, the girl was getting my info. She asked if I had another way of being reached other than by the phone number I gave her. I said that I could be reached by email. She asked for my address. I gave it to her. Then she wanted the phone number for my email address.

The other day I took exception to an insulting joke that someone had sent me, repeatedly, in his email signature.

His response: "Don't draw conclusions about me from my email signature!"

Isn't that what an email signature is for?

Once my friend tried to send me a message by clicking on the "mailto:" link on my web page -- but no one had set up email on her system, so it didn't work.

She came to me the next day and told me about it. "Your computer must not have been turned on," she said, diagnosing the problem.

I received two differently worded email letters that said essentially the same thing (obviously something happened and the sender didn't realize the first letter had gotten sent, so she typed up a second and sent that too). The letters were complaining on the subject of foul language in the movies, and she asked if anything could be done about it. I maintain a movie-related web site, so this did not seem out of the ordinary to me. I answered her, saying she should contact the studios directly.

The next thing I know, I received another letter from the address. It asked who I was and how in the world had I gotten hold of this movie language letter. It concluded by saying, "This is not my regular email address, so please respond to this one...."

All I could figure out was that this person had logged into her friend's account, found a letter of email addressed to her friend in response to her friend's email, and got confused.

I answered her, saying who I was and that I didn't know how or where the original email had come from. I speculated on a couple theories, including the one above (expressed in less demeaning terms), to help sort out the problem.

She writes back acting all snotty, acting like I'm a nosy little jerk unduly interested in her Internet access, and then, in that "I asked you once" tone, would I please tell her honestly how I came about that original letter on the subject of movie language? She went on to say that she really did write the letter, but it wasn't supposed to be sent to me. It was supposed to go to the Vice President of the United States at whitehouse.gov. My email address is absolutely nothing like that of our Vice President's. To type mine out accidentally when trying to type out his, you need to mistype somewhere around 25 characters in just the right way. To this day, I have no idea how she flubbed this up, and I know she doesn't.

I wrote her back, telling her I didn't appreciate her attitude, and, for the second time, that her original email was emailed normally to my mailbox and that that that's how I came about it.

Three days later, I get yet another letter from her. It was slightly differently worded, but what it said was that I was acting like a nosy little jerk unduly interested in her Internet access and then, in that "I asked you once" tone, would I please tell her honestly how I came about that original letter on the subject of movie language?

That's right, she sent me a differently worded version of the same email as before. I wrote back, hopefully for the last time, saying she should learn how to read and write email before she chews someone out over it. But with her track record, I have no idea if she'll ever actually read it.

This story is an example of a kind of mass stupidity mob that happens in various forums on the Internet all the time. I don't understand why.

I belong to a mailing list, the topic of which will remain unnamed. The list's only purpose is to send out a brief newsletter every day talking about things of interest to the subscribers. Consequently, the list is set up so that, normally, only the owner of the list is allowed to send messages; none of the recipients can post to it. After months of running smoothly, the mailing list software went haywire, and suddenly everyone was able to post to the list. Chaos broke out, and people started to send notes to the list (a list of about 500 people, mind you) just to be "cute." Had it been left alone, the flood of mail would have quickly subsided. But then a wave of people started posting to the list telling these people to stop it. Letters poured in reading "STOP IT!" and "DON'T REPLY!" and "Why are you sending this to me?" This triggered more people to do that, which triggered more, and so on. In the first couple hours, there were easily seventy of these silly nonsense notes telling everyone else to stop sending out mail. You'd think common sense would keep people from "solving" the problem by contributing to it.

I subscribe to a listserver that covers an automotive topic. Last year one of the list members went on vacation and set up his email server to autoreply to any email with a message that he was out of town. Unfortunately, he didn't unsubscribe from the list before he left.

You can guess the result. Everytime anyone sent a message to the list, this guy's automated reply went out on it too. The listserver fell down and went "splat" a couple of times before things got sorted out.

This story points out the amazing fact that, although it is great fun to laugh at the mistakes of computer newbies, it takes the knowledge and expertise of a fairly competent newbie system administrator to make your sides really split. That's me, and I maintain our organization's UNIX systems.

There I was, looking at my screen, pondering what I saw. It was a message, stuck in the mail queue for no apparent reason. So, I figured, "What the hey, let's process the queue and see if it goes out." It didn't. And it said it was stuck because it couldn't contact the remote site. "They must be down, then," I figured. So, since I was bored, I decided to speed up the rate at which the queue got processed by typing "sendmail -q5". And after about ten minutes, I got bored of watching the message sit there in the queue and went on to other things. I assume the message eventually went, but I never went back to check up on it.

Later that day, someone sent out email to the whole office using a mailing list that we had set up specifically for that purpose. I got four copies of the message. Some people only got one; others got as many as seven or eight. Needless to say, I was a little shocked. The sender insisted he only hit 'send' once. I dubbed around a little bit, looking for the cause, but didn't find it. So I left it until the next day.

The next day, people were complaining to me left and right that everytime they used the mailing list to send office mail, people would get multiple copies. I thought, "This is a serious problem now." So I did what every good newbie system administrator would have done in that situation. I rebooted the mail server. And lo and behold, it actually worked.

Feeling pretty good about myself, I went to check on the sendmail daemon to see if it was running (as a sanity check more than anything -- mail was going out, so I knew it was running). But I discovered, much to my surprise, that sendmail wasn't running at all -- and mail was still going out.

I was shocked. I felt a little scared. And then, suddenly, I felt incredibly stupid. I finally remembered that we don't USE sendmail, we use SMTP. So I checked the SMTP process, and there it was, happily processing email.

It took me a few minutes to figure out what probably happened. When I was looking at the stuck job, I started a copy of the sendmail daemon. Not only that, I set it to a delay of only five seconds. The regular daemon, SMTP, is set by default to 30 or 60 seconds.

So when the queue got plugged by the mounds of mail going out in an all-office mailing, was this: SMTP got to it first, because the process was triggered by the mail entering the queue. But it wasn't fast enough to keep ahead of sendmail. Sendmail could process the queue but couldn't delete the message from it after it had sent the message. So while SMTP was plodding through the messages one by one, sending them and cleaning them up, sendmail was blazing through them, delete nothing, and do it all over again in another five seconds.

As it happened, people who were at the physical bottom of the mailing list got the most copies of the message, while the person at the top would only get one or two.

Needless to say, I kept this knowledge to myself, and instead of being the laughing stock of the office, I was the hero for having "solved" the great mail problem.

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