Today was a record setting day for my inbox, 11,005 messages. The story behind it is quite entertaining.
An instructor sent a message to his class e-mail list. One student, who works at a local frozen food manufacturer, had set up an out-of-office reponse, so her e-mail program responded accordingly. The list server took broadcasted that message to everyone on the list, including the student, so when the message that said she was out of the office came back, her e-mail program responded that she was out of the office, again. This is what is called an infinite loop. It will keep repeating until interruped.
The side affects included most students on the list got their e-mail accounts pushed over quota, so the mail servers all sent me a notification of the failure, which I got at 10AM this morning. The whole thing is quite hilarious, and the moral is: Don’t use Out of Office type auto-responders.
why do people think they’re so important that they need those? i say, e-me when you get back. i don’t care where you are now.
I hate it when I get an auto response from someones email at work. Normally I already know that they are gone but I am sending them something that I need them to read when they get back. It’s annoying.