Comment by sethammons
4 years ago
My email sending bug: I work at a large email sending company. You’ve heard of us. One of my first days on the job (years ago now), my task was to set a cron to send out emails to folks to say “hey you’re almost out of credits you should upgrade your plan.” Well there was a bug caused by a couple different problems in the system. And it turns out that the utility got stuck on a tight loop on one poor individual’s inbox. this poor yahoo recipient received over 400,000 emails from me in a matter of seconds. Yeah, i felt pretty bad there.
In a way it’s better to completely obliterate one persons inbox than sent one email by accident to 400k people.
The first you could apologize in many ways including financial, the second you really can only apologize by doing it again.
>the second you really can only apologize by doing it again.
Do you though? Is there value in sending yet another email? Is there harm in not sending another email? For those of use "tuned in", we just grab the popcorn, and show sympathy for the poor chap that is having a bad day. The rest of the world probably ignores. Maybe some people report it as spam?
I once sent spam out to persons unknown. It was probably sent to about 4000 people - but no one could actually be sure.
So to fix it, I sent an "I'm sorry email" to the following: my boss, his boss, and 50 key customers, all on BCC so they didn't know who I was "apologizing to" and left it at that.
Depending on the type of accidental email it may have tracking links and the software may let you redirect those links to a “we screwed up” page.
Sending an apology email really should be reserved for situations where the mistake included erroneous information - a “Dewey defeats Truman” type of email, or with wrong dates, etc.
I was building a system to call patients and remind them of doctors appointments. This was hooked to a T1 I think, with dozens of phone lines. Naturally, we tested this with our own phone numbers. One evening I get a call reminding me of a fake appointment, and while I listen to the reminder and enjoy knowing I built this... I get a call waiting notification (and you know the rest)
... (but I'll say the rest anyway). The system was using dozens of phone lines to call me and leaving multiple voice messages simultaneously. I considered myself reminded.
I did that to myself via gmail. Gmail has some kind of weird quota. It got to the point where it would only let like 100 emails per hour through. So that 5 minutes of email blast turned into one big blast, and then 100 emails per hour, for like 14 days straight. Thanks filters at least to send them to the trash..
Depending on the time period, it's pretty easy to clean out nice well patterned spam like that these days. In the days of yester-year, it could be a largely manual process.
In AOL one prank was to flood someone with emails because it was difficult to remove them, IIRC and needed to be done almost one by one.
> In AOL one prank was to flood someone with emails because it was difficult to remove them, IIRC and needed to be done almost one by one.
An email service one of my friends used around 2005/6 (I can't remember if it was Lycos or the school internal system) had a similar issue - you could only remove a page (10-15 IIRC) of emails at a time. Once he mentioned this, one of my other friends took this as a cue to blast him with 32k (pretty sure it was 32768) emails. I don't think he ever got them all deleted.
My company had a bug that did this and Yahoo throttled mail from our server into uselessness for weeks.
Serves them right for using Yahoo mail.