He should have remembered that no (intended) good deed goes unpunished!

Yeah, that'd improve his Outlook...

.. should have remembered ...

And that he was the fuse in the sysadmin circuit.

O.

who was really at fault here?

Lucas, for multiple reasons. A "potentially suspicious" email could still have contained business-related confidential or personal data, no emails should be automatically forwarded out of the company mail system. Also, if he's on a day off then he should have either arranged for his colleagues to cover him, of let them know he wasn't really off, anything else could lead to duplicated work (as it did).

In the early days, just about at the time Exchange was first being launched (and allegedly there were only a handful of people in the UK who knew how to configure it) we'd moved from having modems on individual PCs to an ISDN based proprietary box which one day suffered a similar snow storm. Tracking tools were limited but by a process of elimination I tracked it down to the engineering manager. He'd sent a perfectly valid email to a supplier rep which elicited an out of office message that required a read receipt !

As mentioned in the article things weren't sophisticated back then so the read receipt prompted another out of office message which also requested a read receipt...

I suspect the rep at the other end got a dressing down over it from his employer but it took a while to manage to break the chain at our end.

Well, I wouldn't expect that as it shouldn't be the rep's business to know their mail server workings. Their sysadmins, OTOE....

Around the same time I managed to bring down two mail servers, I set an out of office response, sending server replied with a "this email address is not monitored" email, cue email loop. How come no-one spotted this possibility when creating automated OoO messages!? Surely the second thing you'd think of is "what if two people have OoO set"? Mailing lists were a thing back then

Around the same time (or possibly a bit earlier), I built an out-of-office system based on procmail.

Loops were indeed known about and the advice was to include an X-loop header that can be filtered on.

Later supplanted by logging replied messages and only sending one reply per address per day.

I worked for a senior manager. A project was in trouble, so the senior manager sent out an email to the managers clearly laying out the situation, and the action plan. 30 seconds later he realised that should have said "do not forward this email", so he rushed into my office and asked if I go to to IT support and kill it.

I rushed down two flights of stairs and into IT support.

"Too late they said" they could see it had already be forwarded to over 100 non managers.

I went back to the senior manager and said "sorry - too late". He said don't worry, that is good news. He had received some emails from the grunts ( sorry, the professionals) with words like "Thank you for a clear statement, it looks like someone is finally doing something about the problems". So overall he came out well.

That story triggered a memory of a similar thing happening to me just over 10 years back.The customer used office and Exchange 2007. We were suddenly faced with a mail storm of our own, the logdisk of one database just kept flooding with streams and streams of logfiles, gigs at a time. Those disks weren't all that big, so it filled up to capacity in a matter of hours. We were frantically trying to figure out what was happening, even involved Microsoft to try and find the root cause (all the while manually deleting logfiles, which had been sanctioned as a one time workaround). After several hours of searching we finally got the root cause. A user was transfering to a new department and thought it was a good idea to zip up all his work and email it to himself as sort of an archive. His mailbox was about 1.2 GB when he performed the action, the file was 800 MB. In itself this would not be a problem, unfortunately we used Exchange caching and that's where everything fell apart. in Outlook 2007 an OST could not exceed 2 GB, it simply stopped working after that. The user with the 800 Mb attachment (they had no limit, customer enforced) sent his mailbox to 2.8 GB, filling up the OST to the 2 GB mark, crapping out and restarting the process, with the massive log flood as a result.

Good times!

It's easy to screw up with an email system. Reply to all, emails storm, etc ...

I archived a couple fun ones for personal use, always funny to read back some of those old shitstorms ;)

And we've learned lots of things through lots of errors and surprises, but I think the one bit of email functionality that has to have caused the most trouble is the out of office auto-reply.

It is rather useful, generally speaking, but it can still cause havoc even now. Thankfully, email servers have been taught to not auto-reply to auto-replies.

Sorry my good man, private email box even back then was a no-no regardless of the intentions.

However getting another year also suggests this incident wasn't the reason for the departure either.

A colleague once triggered a mail flood between his mailbox and mine.

When me or the other senior tech on my team went on vacation we'd set up a regular OoO and, for a select number of addresses, a supplemental forwarding rule to the other senior to make sure requests from higher ups were properly followed up

Well, I went on holidays and set the rules, but my colleague had to take a day off and did the usual. Unfortunately the forwarding rules weren't set to just forward mail from those contacts, but also when they were CC'd... so when the first email form someone on the list was sent to his address (or mine, really don't remember who first triggered the glitch), mails started being forwarded from one account to the other until it froze the Exchange server)

I think he got a bit of an earful the next day, but nothing of consequence (except learning not to do it again)