[Techtalk] The Candle Lighting email and an email shutdown

[Annette M. Stroud]

Jennifer S. Davis wrote:


> Just for background information, I work in a department in the federal
> government.  We have about 4000 employees, so we aren't a large
> department.  Anyhow, someone had the not so bright idea to send an email
> through our exchange server to every single employee asking them to
> light a candle at a certain time.  That was annoying, but it is
> understandable as people were caught up in the tragedy in the
> US.  It was especialy so as we are across from Parliament and there was
> a large memorial service.  Regardless, someone in our deaperment was
> sensitive enough to point out that the US was the true author of this
> tragedy and well, that would have been all fine and good had she kept her
> opinion to herself, but instead she hit the reply to all button.  Of
> course that started a debate that involved the whole bloody department and
> well crashed our system.  When the Info Managaement people got involved
> asking people to stop forwarding the message, people started forwarding
> the message to everyone telling everyone else to stop.
>
> Basically, I was just wanted to share a story that would be funny if the
> subject matter wasn't so serious and I was wondering if anyone else
> experienced this in ther offices.

No.  Once before mail servers were very sophisticated,  a woman with two
accounts at the university forwarded both of her accounts to each other.
She then kept sending test messages to herself to try to figure out why she
wasn't getting anything...  Brought the server down rather quickly.

Reply and reply all ought to be far from each other.  Ditto send and cancel.
And a warning should pop up if reply all is selected.  Many embarrassments
have been caused by the reply all.

Annette