Dear Users... (A thread for Sysadmin, Technical Support, and Help Desk people)

[arthwollipot]

It surprises me how little trust people have in a simple email.

Hi, I'm phoning to check whether you received an email.

Did the sender receive delivery failure notification?

No.

Was it sent to the correct address?

Yes.

Then the email was received.

She also wanted to check whether an email from her manager was sufficient for the kind of request she had, or whether she needed to do something else. I was very tempted to suggest that that was the sort of question that probably may have been best asked before the email was sent.

 

[zooterkin]

It may have been delivered by the mail system, doesn't mean it was received by someone who could act upon it. The last place I worked, the IT managed spam filter was sometimes sending messages from the IT department to the junk mail folder.

 

[Wudang]

And the email protocol SMTP does not guarantee delivery.

 

[arthwollipot]

For all intents and purposes, it can truthfully be said that if a legitimate message fails to reach its destination, it will report a Delivery Failure Notification to the sender. In all cases with our quarantine system, a report will be sent to the recipient of a quarantined messages because that's what it was designed to do. Emails do not just vanish.

I once experienced a situation where an email took two weeks to arrive at its destination, but that was in 1994.

 

[arthwollipot]

It may have been delivered by the mail system, doesn't mean it was received by someone who could act upon it.

Oh, and one other thing. In this particular case, the person who could act upon it was me.

 

[zooterkin]

Oh, and one other thing. In this particular case, the person who could act upon it was me.

I don't think that affects the working of the mail system. A message might be delivered to the mail server, but for some reason your mail client is not able to access it, and you may be unaware of that. The message is delivered, but you cannot see it until the client connection is re-established. Not a hypothetical situation, but one that has happened to me more than once. Similarly, if it is misfiled in the junk folder; again, you won't see it.

 

[zooterkin]

It's also a less confrontational way of asking why you haven't acted on the email yet, giving the option that the message has gone astray.

 

[catsmate]

I have a gmail account of the format firstname.lastname. My full name is not desperately uncommon.

Mine is pretty uncommon, I've only a few namesakes that I've found in that way.

I have namesakes in NYC, Ohio, North Carolina, Florida, Texas, British Columbia, London and Sydney, all of whom are reliably incapable of getting their mail addresses correct in online forms, utilities contracts and, most impressively, CVs.

What gets me is a company who sends x.y@server a receipt when the receipt itself lists the email address as z_y@server. This is a special kind of stupidity.

The lack of response I get when I try to inform people of their errors is deeply depressing.
I find a threat to some of their senior manager (it's usually easy to find their contact details on Linkedin) to forward the matter to the local DataProc authorities helps. But some staff are frighteningly stupid.

The difficulty I have in contacting a number of US-based institutions to tell them of the error is astonishing. Numerous places don’t accept contact via mail or twitter; all they offer is a phone number. As I’m in Europe, screw that.

Try Linkedin and search for the company.

 

[malbui]

Try Linkedin and search for the company.

My philosophy is that if I can reply to a mail or click a link to be able to pass a message, I will. But it’s not my responsibility to do research to compensate for some stranger’s incompetence.

 

[arthwollipot]

I don't think that affects the working of the mail system. A message might be delivered to the mail server, but for some reason your mail client is not able to access it, and you may be unaware of that. The message is delivered, but you cannot see it until the client connection is re-established. Not a hypothetical situation, but one that has happened to me more than once. Similarly, if it is misfiled in the junk folder; again, you won't see it.

Except that that has never happened, and it did not happen in this case. I had the email. It was in a queue.

It's also a less confrontational way of asking why you haven't acted on the email yet, giving the option that the message has gone astray.

I had the email. It was in a queue.

 

[zooterkin]

Except that that has never happened, and it did not happen in this case. I had the email. It was in a queue.

Having worked on (written and supported) enterprise mail servers for a significant while, as well as using them for several decades, I know that email is not infallible.

I had the email. It was in a queue.

How was she to know that? She sent the email. Nothing happened.

 

[Darat]

It may have been delivered by the mail system, doesn't mean it was received by someone who could act upon it. The last place I worked, the IT managed spam filter was sometimes sending messages from the IT department to the junk mail folder.

So working as designed?

 

[Wudang]

Having worked on (written and supported) enterprise mail servers for a significant while, as well as using them for several decades, I know that email is not infallible.


How was she to know that? She sent the email. Nothing happened.

When I worked at IBM Hursley we had access to printing and binding services and I used to keep a box of these under my desk to give to people who came to my office with "a simple question" re: TCP/IP.

Guaranteed delivery was actually one of the selling points for what I knew as Message-Driven Processing and emerged as IBM MQSeries. Because smtp does not guarantee delivery.

 

[CORed]

I don't think that affects the working of the mail system. A message might be delivered to the mail server, but for some reason your mail client is not able to access it, and you may be unaware of that. The message is delivered, but you cannot see it until the client connection is re-established. Not a hypothetical situation, but one that has happened to me more than once. Similarly, if it is misfiled in the junk folder; again, you won't see it.

When my work email at a federal government agency was using Lotus Notes client and Lotus Domino servers, I know of one instance in which multiple emails which had a user name that did not exist in the domain to which they were addressed were delivered to a user with that user name in a different domain.

More detail: I normally use my middle name, rather than my first. My work email account is <FirstInitial><MiddleInitial<@domain. My user ID on the ERP system we use is <MiddleInitial>. I had a scheduled job on the ERP system set up to send an email to a list of users, inlcuding me, if there was an error. My user record in the ERP system had the email field blank. The system was configured such that if the email in the user record was blank, email would be sent to <ERPuser>@domain (same domain as my email). These emails ended up in the inbox of somebody who worked for a different federal government agency, in a different city, with a different email domain, but whose user name matched the one the ERP system was putting on the email. She replied to the list on the email, obviously perplexed and more than a bit frustrated as to why the hell she was getting these emails. The fix was easy; put the correct email address in the user record of the ERP system. I attribute this primarily to the fact that the whole Lotus Notes/Domino email system was a steaming pile of crap.

 

[Wudang]

Notes and Domino are pretty good if competently administered. At the IBM lab I worked at we had our own support and Notes was integrated with other systems and worked really well. Then corporate took over.
One of the trickier aspects is (damn, forgot the term) the cross-site certificate and references that allow other notes domains to wok together. The bank I worked for was a complete shambles. Supposed to be a global company and we couldn't see colleagues diaries in India or China.

 

[arthwollipot]

Having worked on (written and supported) enterprise mail servers for a significant while, as well as using them for several decades, I know that email is not infallible.

No, of course it's not infallible. But - especially in a government system - it is by and large reliable enough that it is reasonable to assume that unless a Delivery Failure Notification is generated, the email has arrived safely at its destination. Problems are exceptions, and usually pretty obvious.

How was she to know that? She sent the email. Nothing happened.

Of course nothing is going to happen within two minutes of sending email to a service desk that supports approximately 8,000 users in 11 different government agencies. It's completely unrealistic for us to be able to respond that quickly with anything but an automatic reply, which we don't do.

Anyway, another thing that continually amazes me is how many people don't understand what account locking is all about. We get many calls every day from people whose account has been locked, and almost all of them ask why it was locked. It's always the same answer. It's been the same answer for fifteen years. You got your password wrong too many times. Every Windows/Active Directory environment does it.

 

[zooterkin]

Of course nothing is going to happen within two minutes of sending email to a service desk that supports approximately 8,000 users in 11 different government agencies.

Ok, fair enough; that's new information.

Anyway, another thing that continually amazes me is how many people don't understand what account locking is all about. We get many calls every day from people whose account has been locked, and almost all of them ask why it was locked. It's always the same answer. It's been the same answer for fifteen years. You got your password wrong too many times. Every Windows/Active Directory environment does it.

Again, true, but it can happen without you actually entering your password incorrectly at all. It's happened to me when I changed the password, as required by the system settings, on my laptop, but forgot or was not able to update the password on my mobile phone. The mobile continued to try to sign in with the old password, and eventually reached the lock-out limit.

 

[arthwollipot]

Ok, fair enough; that's new information.

Yep, that's the bit that I had neglected to mention.

Again, true, but it can happen without you actually entering your password incorrectly at all. It's happened to me when I changed the password, as required by the system settings, on my laptop, but forgot or was not able to update the password on my mobile phone. The mobile continued to try to sign in with the old password, and eventually reached the lock-out limit.

Yes it can, but it's by far less likely. It used to be if you were logged on to two workstations at the same time, and you changed your password on one of them, it would lock you out. Not sure if that still happens. What does happen sometimes is that Credential Manager can store and try to use old passwords. We also use a mobile app suite from Citrix that people can install on their smartphones, and that sometimes stores and tries to use old passwords too. That's a real pain, because the only way we can fix that is to get them to delete and reinstall the apps to their phones, and the install process... let's just say that there are a lot of steps.

 

[Norman Alexander]

Meh. Don't use password, I say!

 

[catsmate]

When my work email at a federal government agency was using Lotus Notes client and Lotus Domino servers, I know of one instance in which multiple emails which had a user name that did not exist in the domain to which they were addressed were delivered to a user with that user name in a different domain.

Meh, Notes. What would you expect?

I attribute this primarily to the fact that the whole Lotus Notes/Domino email system was a steaming pile of crap.

Exactly.