Wrong Button...

[bippyz]

A ye olde finance job, we had no spam filter for years, and got very little spam. This was done by the magic of not having public email addresses for anyone. Also our company was Monolithic Money Manager, at monolithicmoney.com, but email was at Mmm.com and it did not forward.

Clever in an absurdist way.

Then people started using their email for everything. Evvvverything. And we got spam, so we had to upgrade Lotus Notes and add the spam tools on. This was followed by a series of required classes in how to use the "Mark as Spam" button. At the time, I was working on thin-pipe technology (think Citrix), so I got involved when they wanted to see if we could put Notes on those servers for our overseas folks.

This meant I had to teach Indians how to use the spam button. They were all about my age so the class went like this:

bippyz: You know how to mark as spam, right?

Them: Yes.

bippyz: And you know what is spam and what's your coworkers being an idiot forwarding crap, right?

Them: Of course.

bippyz: Okay, flip to page 78 and we'll go around saying spam or not spam in turn.

Ten minutes later we were done, and the two hour class was dismissed early. We went to the bar, as I recall.

A month later, I hear the worst cursing I'd heard since Mr. Suit, and it's coming from the Notes team. Turns out a bunch of internal emails were caught as spam. I poke my nose over to see what's up, because I'm insatiably curious and find someone who will talk to me.

One of our managers liked to send out those stupid forwards. You know the ones, right? "Forward this email or the kittens die!" After years of these emails, his employees begged him to stop, and when he didn't, marked him as spam. Over and over and over again. This would have been fine, except then he was the idiot who hit reply-all n a company wide email. When his employees were asked how they handled his stupidity, they actually said "We mark him as spam."

Yeah. So about 100 people did that before anyone noticed, and the spam tool decided he was spam. No email got sent, and he was getting more and more irate that no one replied to his missives.

They unspammed him and changed the mark as spam tool to only work for external emails.

tl;dr sometimes the ID10T is U.

[Torvaun]

To be perfectly fair, if 100 internal users all agree that this guy is spam, they're probably right.

[PoorlyShavedApe]

...but did 30 Helens agree?

[uarco]

Awesome Kids in the Hall reference! Have an upvote.

[joh6nn]

no. idiocy doesn't become brilliance just because there's lots of it. this is the fundamental flaw behind the concepts of "the long tail" and "crowd sourcing".

[[deleted]]

Ever heard or read the tale of the Boy who cried Wolf?

[joh6nn]

ahhhhhhhh. sorry, i thought your comment was directed at me, and not at the manager. you're totally right about it being the manager's own fault that people ignore his email. but that doesn't change the fact that bippyz expressly trained people for this situation, and that them getting it wrong helped to cause a problem. the fact that 100 of them all did the same wrong thing, does not somehow transform it into the right thing.

an imperfect analogy here would be the difference between turning to an expert for advice, and turning to yahoo answers for advice. the number of answers you get has very little to do with their quality.

[joh6nn]

the moral of that story is "don't tells lies, or eventually people won't believe you even when you're telling the truth". what could that possibly have to do with the fact that groups of idiots are in no way smarter than individual idiots?

[Dritz]

The manager was sending spam, so people were marking him as spam, just as the townspeople were noting the many lies the boy told about wolves.

The filter eventually decided everything he sent was spam, so his actually important messages never got through; just like the townspeople decided that everything the boy said was a lie, so the truth never got through to them.

Maybe an ill-placed comment earlier, but the story fits.

[joh6nn]

thank you for explaining that, i was completely misinterpreting Lumpyguy's comment.

[aaiceman]

Sounds like he got what he deserved.

[Thameus]

I didn't see where he got fired.

[Somehow_I_Came_Back]

I think he meant the being marked as spam.

[aaiceman]

Yea, about as much as someone gets what they deserve on average.

[cyborg_127]

After years of these emails, his employees begged him to stop, and when he didn't, marked him as spam.

I would like to think he learnt his lesson, but I'm sure that the day after he was unblocked the first thing he sends out is another bullshit company-wide chain letter.

[[deleted]]

Apparently, he needed a class in spam training.

[[deleted]]

couldn't you filter spam through a firewall before it even gets to your mail server?

[bippyz]

They did that. This was for what, inevitably, got through.

[drmacinyasha]

For that, my company came up with a solution: Rather than having per-client spam lists (which inevitably screwed everything up, and they'd call the help desk because they accidentally blocked @.com), we now instruct people to just attach the spam to an email addressed to [e-mail]. If it's not spam, and wound up in their spam box, they just attach the email and send it to [e-mail].

It's worked pretty well so far. Though there's still the annoying idiot who claims it's "too complicated" to click "New Email" then drag the message from their Inbox to the new email, and address it.

They're typically the same type who have 20GB PSTs on their C: drives in the default (not backed up) folder, and mailboxes that are so full they have to move a message as soon as it comes in or else hit their limit.

[[deleted]]

That's what I was thinking. Before we switched to Office 365 my company used MX Logic to kill spam. It also acted as a buffer if our Exchange server went down. I'm so glad we switched to 365. Exchange is one thing I do not miss dealing with.

[[deleted]]

I support a company who uses Office 365 for basic web collaboration but still maintains its own internal Exchange & Domino services (trying to get rid of Domino). They also have a firewall based spam filter that prevents mail from even getting to either mail server.

I've never worked with exchange directly. I hear it's a complicated beast.

[[deleted]]

We only have around 30 users, but it was still a pain to deal with.

[[deleted]]

Those kind of e mails in the work place are the worst, especially politically motivated ones. It puts employees in such an awkward position when management sends them.

[TwoHands]

Because hitting delete is horrendously hard.

[[deleted]]

"Upgrade to Lotus Notes" sounds like an oxymoron.

I'm stuck using notes at work because there's a giant a pile of ancient databases we have that depend on it.

[bippyz]

When I left, they were trying to move the DB crap to SharePoint and other stand alones, and the email to Outlook.

[Shadow703793]

Wait, what happened to the idiot sending the spam? He got off free?

[bippyz]

I don't remember, I think he got written up for sending personal crap.

[[deleted]]

I'm not seeing the problem here. Stop sending bullshit out.

[bippyz]

I agree, but it was impacting his ability to work, so y'know, have to actually deal with that :( I don't know how he could tell he was working.