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People are Dumb
11/02/05
People are Dumb
This morning, someone at work got one of those "if you forward this to everyone in your address book, Bill Gates will send you 1 million dollars and a free trip to Disney World" e-mails, and decided to send it to everyone in the company...
Not only was this annoying, but it had serious consequences for our e-mail system. When this bright person chose all 5000+ names in the global address book to put in the TO: line of his e-mail, he instantly made the message itself over 1 MB in size just because of the number of names attached. Then, he sent it to all those people, which created a copy of that 1 MB e-mail in every person's mailbox. This alone added 5 GB to the amount of e-mail storage in use.
But that's not enough - idiots travel in groups. Dozens of people hit "reply to all" ('cause they want to get their million bucks too) and re-sent it to everyone again! A few people were smart enough to know that it was just a scam, and replied with some reprimand or request that they not be included in these "waste of time" e-mails, but they too used "reply to all" (I guess they wanted to make sure everyone knew not to send it to them), which sent even more 1 MB e-mails to all 5000+ people.
The server that forwards e-mails to our Blackberries is completely down, which is probably good, because my Blackberry doesn't even have enough memory for all those messages. The mail system itself is horribly slow now as it tries to sort and manage a couple hundred gigabytes of mail over the last hour or so.
You gotta love technology!
11 comments
I was going to send you one of those e-mails but I guess now I won't...are you saying it's a scam? 
Yeah, Mary, I'm starting to think it's a scam. I got one of those e-mails *years* ago, and Bill Gates is either behind schedule or has kinda forgotten because I haven't received a thing from him. But, maybe if we keep trying.... 
Did you forward it to everyone in your address book? Because it only works if you forward it to everyone in your address book. Bill Gates can tell if you didn't forward it to everyone in your address book... 
Hahaha I'm sorry. I know that's annoying and I would be very irritated....but it's very funny to read about. :) 
I can hear Kris saying it. It is kinda funny coming from his viewpoint! 
That would make me quite nervous knowing there are people like that in I/T. Of course we've had something related at work: a Truck Discrepancy Report email accidentally went to a large group and, wouldn't you know it, there's always one or two who have to "reply to all" and express some derisive comment. One response in particular still stands out in memory: "THIS IS RIDICULES!!!!!!!!". Classic. At least they weren't I/T folks. :p Shane, I think you misunderstood. None of these were IT people. These were regular employees at various locations. The IT people were running around trying to stop it. 
Well Bill wasn’t behind for us! Tim and I went to Disney World for our honeymoon because we sent the same message to everyone in our Global Contacts List.That Bill sure is nice!
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