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Comment by thelopa

4 years ago

I had a experience like this, once. Luckily it was less visible, but I felt like a fool all the same.

I came out as trans and changed my name last year, and with the name change I set up a new email alias for work. Then I set up automation to send out a gentle reminder email about the change for people who emailed my old alias. It worked fantastically for a few months… right up until the point that (due to a series of individually innocent events) the automation ended up running across the entirety of my 7 years worth of inbox. Everyone who had mailed me over the 7 years prior to the name change started getting the reminder email. One reminder for each email they had sent me. The worst part is that due to a bug in the email automation stuff, emails sent by the automation weren’t preserved in my sent box. So I don’t even know how many people I spammed. If I had to guess, I sent dozens of emails to the CEO and other execs, hundreds to my director, and thousands to people who worked closely with me over the years.

I learned a valuable lesson that day.

21 comments

thelopa

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toomanyducks  4 years ago

I've been laughing at myself for like two years now about how awkwardly I came out, and only now do i realize how fortunate i am that i didn't try to automate it. Thank you very much

mkr-hn  4 years ago

I thought I was done with queer tragedy stories, but I could read more of this subgenre.

snarkypixel  4 years ago

What was the valuable lesson? :p

  • throwawayboise  4 years ago

    Don't write your own email auto-responders?

    • thelopa  4 years ago

      You joke, but there is a profound truth to this. Don’t reinvent the wheel. To be fair, it’s not like I wrote any real code for my auto-responder. I used a slightly janky mail tool that could, if held just right, be used to set up an auto-responder. I should have looked for something a bit more bulletproof and focused, but I wanted to play with this specific tool and see what I could make it do.

      Mostly, I’m kicking myself for not thinking to put safeguards in. Dependencies can fail in unexpected ways, and I should have set up my auto-responder to be a bit more defensive.

    • donbrae  4 years ago

      I did similar in Mac Mail a few years ago: it caused an out-of-office reply to be sent to every email I’d ever sent going back years. I was surprised Mail allowed for this scenario. Needless to say, my holiday got off to a stressful start!

Gary_Boooossy  4 years ago

Do you really share these things in a professional context? What country was this in?

  • frandroid  4 years ago

    You're getting downvoted to hell, but I'm going to respond anyway. The parent poster here is fully transitioning their gender. They're not cross-dressing at night, they're not "closeted trans"--they're changing their identity for their whole life, in all contexts--personal, professional, etc. Furthermore, they don't want to be known by their old identity anymore--in the parlance, that's called a deadname. So they're informing people of that happening, of who they're identifying as from now on.

  • floatingatoll  4 years ago

    It’s often considered professional courtesy to let people know when a property that matters to 99% of humanity (name and gender) changes permanently. Everyone takes a different approach. There are upsides and downsides to the “email autoresponder” method, but it’s certainly an acceptable option in local instances of context.

  • dec0dedab0de  4 years ago

    Is there any professional context where you wouldn't share when your professional email address changed?