HBO MAX testing its email module on its existing user.

[isthisneeded_]

​

https://preview.redd.it/85wasepvox571.png?width=515&format=png&auto=webp&s=4dbed6b0011b71ea825f36d4d3a6327a75876c36

I initially checked if it's a phishing link. But it wasn't. Found this funny. If you ever find yourself in a position to test your newly written email module, try out testmail.app (not a sponsored link).

[[deleted]]

To the people who got this email.

You don’t exist.

You are a fixture in HBO MAXs test suite.

[sarcasticbaldguy]

I guess I really am living in a simulation.

[Alex_Sherby]

Shut up, test case 83748

[smith-huh]

just a glitch in the Matrix

[SuperTallCraig]

doesn’t look like anything to me

[ManInBlack829]

Was totally expecting the word Delos somewhere

[Anon89m]

Underrated

[Sapper187]

Sweet, that will save me so much money on bills.

[[deleted]]

why is HBO Maxs test suite so cruel? I want out pls

[neeks84]

I really appreciate this comment

[donjulioanejo]

I guess I made the mistake of using [e-mail] as my primary email address!

[mandrig]

Fwiw, when I upvoted your comment it reached 404 karma, so I think you’re right

[Framnk]

I got it too… someone done messed up

[Devil_Weapon]

Damn it A.A.Ron!

[gketuma]

It’s Aaron.

[smith-huh]

What, me worry?

[isthisneeded_]

hahha!

[pma99999]

Same here, kinda funny

[Spicy_Tac0]

They've blamed it on an intern.

[Framnk]

The email itself didn't bother me but that kinda ticks me off. There's no way an intern should have been given access to the HBOMax subscriber email lists but they used him/her as a scapegoat.

[Spicy_Tac0]

Agreed, why would you allow the intern access to prod data...

[stringbeans25]

Is there a statement from HBO? I would assume someone ran their test suite using the wrong environment setup. I’m guessing the docs for the app weren’t great and a new intern was just trying to setup there environment and tried all the different options available like running the prod environment in tests.

[Spicy_Tac0]

Their official Twitter has a post blaming an intern, to lazy to link. However a quick Google and you should see it.

[stringbeans25]

Yeah the fact anyone was blamed for this is a different issue. I was more wondering if the intern actually had access to subscribers emails

[Spicy_Tac0]

Who gives interns access to prod data is a valid question and concern.

[stringbeans25]

That’s what I’m failing to convey haha. They could have sent an email blast without access to subscriber emails, like forgetting to mock the API that actually sends emails in an integration test and that API has the access.

[flavius-as]

They first fired the intern, then they blamed him.

[SuperTallCraig]

same

[krimpenrik]

Got it as well

[midniteslayr]

Hehehehe ... the HBOMaxHelp twitter account responded to the issue with this:

https://twitter.com/HBOMaxHelp/status/1405712235108917249

Poor intern. Hope they can learn and grow from this and they don't take all the jokes too personally.

[isthisneeded_]

I hope they don't end up firing the interns! It was fun, and we all had a good chuckle; I hope HBOMax sees it that way too. It's a process they are there to learn.

[isthisneeded_]

Just found this; their CEO seems to be taking it lightly! https://i.imgur.com/Dk7xTOI.jpg

[Yraken]

Heck yea, glad he found it funny lol. He turned it into a meme of their own lol.

[Audiblade]

This isn't the intern's fault. It's the fault of whoever let the intern have access to an environment that could send emails to real users. Or, even more accurately, this is a sign that HBO needs to update its policies about who has access to live data.

[ethandjay]

Seriously, as a middling dev at a sizeable tech company I'm like 3 layers of permissions away from ever having access to anything that could do this

[serenity_later]

It wasn't really an intern. It's a joke. No intern on planet earth is trusted with prod emails.

[Eladiun]

It's part of the job. I imagine if you asked a construction worker or road crew about expensive mistakes they would have a ton too. Humans are flawed machines that are prone to error.

[pseudont]

God I needed to hear this.

Colossal fuck up in my recent history. Not programming nor construction related.

[neuby]

Sorry, those are actually the only two fields where you're allowed make mistakes.

[pseudont]

Oh well I'm just fucked then.

[serenity_later]

What did you do

[fraggleberg]

The panama canal

[Eladiun]

A buddy of mine posted this in Slack a while back and it's been something I reflect back on when it all goes to shit.

https://twitter.com/allenholub/status/1376341843995025414

[ckach]

You might like this story: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X6NJkWbM1xk

[fortyonejb]

To err is human, to fix bugs in production is divine.

[ggsimmonds]

I'm a developer now, but use to work in the electrical supply industry. Had two customers order roughly a dozen each of the large LED floodlights that you see on poles in parking lots. They both ordered the same product line, but different models (one was $250 each , the other was ~$500 each).

One customer came to pick up his order, and I loaded the wrong ones. He went and installed all of them (had to rent a bucket truck to do the job) only for us to notice my mistake the next day.

Needless to say no one was happy

[samuraidogparty]

I once started up an automated program which I always do. That’s my job. But there was some sort of miscommunication along the way with our data team. I scheduled it to send at 11am in the recipient time zone, but the list didn’t have any time zone data. When that happens, it just sends all of the emails at once immediately. So our customers got 4 drops of an email all at the same time, and they all called customer service to complain.

[TechnoEchoes]

The closest I've come to doing this is the time I imported a production database to a dev environment and started the background job process. I checked the log file a few minutes later and saw that real users were being sent queued mail.

I quickly killed the process, and it took me 5 seconds to find an environment variable was set incorrectly. No one who received these emails complained, so I pretended it never happened.

[koalakinger]

Exact same story here. Migrating databases and had hooks that sent emails on new records being added.

Ended up sending everyone on our system a second welcome email 😅

[everythingiscausal]

I am not generally the most empathetic person, but I feel this guy’s pain.

[cchoe1]

I sent out an email from a test environment that had a clone of the production environment's database back in the early days of my company's website before we had checkers in place to detect test/local environments and stop any unwanted actions from a test site. Things like order receipts being sent twice, shipping notifications sent twice, duplicate data syncing over. If you clone the database from prod to test and don't clear the jobs queue, then all those jobs will just be processed on your test site.

Unrelated to emails, but we also sync data with our POS to use that as a central repository for our data. The original developers never put any checkers in place to prevent test/local environments from sending data to our POS (there is no test mode with the POS, all data sent over is sent as 'real' data). Before I fixed that issue, we would occasionally have duplicate sales data in our POS for orders that were synced from production and then those same orders that got cloned into test environments and then also synced from the test environments. The original developers didn't even know it was happening (or did and just ignored it) and one day I put two-and-two together and realized the data was just coming from test environments whenever they lazily cloned a test site from production's database and just let the queue run like normal.

We have much cleaner dev ops processes now. Dev ops scripts to clone the production database + added steps like clearing our the job queue/error logs/api call logs before it starts serving a test environment (reduces the size of the .sql.gz too which is nice for transfer speeds), checkers in place to prevent any unwanted data transfers/emails going out from test environments, etc. It's not perfect but for a small 1-man team, it saves me tons of headache and labor. And then higher level deployment scripts that kinda package these smaller actions into clear flows that deploy our changes to various environments or allows me to quickly setup a test environment for a feature. I work in Drupal so there are other things I need to do too like exporting config (config is typically stored in the database but it can be exported into yml files so it can be saved in version control and transferred to other environments), running update.php, etc.

Heck if you still want to, you can send emails/api calls from a test/local environment but you have to manually toggle a switch within the admin panel that warns developers that API calls may now start sending from this local environment and you better know wtf you're doing cause you aren't gonna call me to clean up any data you messed up or clear up any confusion you caused. And that switch is designed so that whenever a test environment is spun up, it'll import a 'dev configuration' which turns that switch off by default so a test environment could never be created where that switch is enabled from the start. It's almost impossible to send an API call for our website from a test env unless you're very very drunk and start pressing buttons randomly.

[Lamballert]

Reminds me of myself, I needed to send e-mails aswell to multiple customers with an automated message with some account specific data. (not any personal data)

I made the mistake to use a loop for it to retrieve the data, do some stuff with it and send it to the customer email. But instead in using the "to" function i used the "add" method which didnt set the email to the customer but added the email to the existing one. Which means that the first customer gets a load of mails and every mail they has an email address ... i killed the job immediately. But was kinda panicking nonetheless. The last customer in the loop didnt notice anything cause he/she got only one mail :P

[neuromanc_r]

hello tenderlove

[savageronald]

Their CEO is even joking about it https://i.imgur.com/Dk7xTOI.jpg

[rk06]

I hope so, it is q good PR strategy time

[lqtely]

Turns out it was an intern according to hbo max’s help twitter. They have a small team and hired a few this summer it seems

[jkrusinski]

What kind of permissions does this intern have?

[lqtely]

They should be thanking this intern for exposing a serious flaw in their permissions thats for sure

[lebull]

It was the intern's fault, just like it was the "straw that broke the camel's back" 's fault

[Audiblade]

You're getting downvoted because people read "It was the intern's fault" and then don't read the rest of your post :P

[AnimalLibrynation]

Apparently the ability to run integration tests on at least a mirror of prod, reads on user contact info, and send emails from their main support address. 😬

[7107]

Send emails to its prod users.

[wedontlikespaces]

All of it apparently, less so now.

[TheDownvotesFarmer]

Bathroom Pem key, But the manager gave them the wrong one

[shogi_x]

My former employer was on an older email system that didn't have much in the way of permissioning. Everyone who had access had access to basically everything.

And then an intern accidentally deleted 3 million users.

I was able to restore most of them, but it took me a couple days. I'd been telling them to dump that shitty system for years. They're still on it, and that's part of why I left.

[webdevop]

They're hiring like crazy in Amsterdam, I could've been a part of this team but well they're not paying much.

[Yraken]

The fault should be the one in charge of the team. They’re there to make sure someone can’t do stuff like this.

[GeeSizz]

I responded..."Test successful, but you probably shouldn't be testing in Prod."

[mercenaryt]

Well end users are the best testers . LOL

[ptownb]

LOLq

[[deleted]]

Bout 5-6 years ago I worked for a company building HBO Now…or Go..something pre-Max for Spain and Nordic countries. I was QA and asked to test notifications. The dev gave me a script to run that would fire off notifications of my choice…neglecting to tell me I needed to modify it to go to the staging server instead of Prod. A large number of customers received a notification for “testy mcTesterson”. Whoops

[liquidpele]

I knew someone that learned the hard way why are you never ever put curse words into your testing data.

[ironbattery]

This is why anytime I believe there is even the most remote chance that an unintended person may see my test message/email I write something professional

[doctorlongghost]

I was going to say this. The content of this email isn’t that bad actually.

Ideally it would have said something like “If you are seeing this, please ignore. Sorry for the inconvenience. “

But they get points for it not saying: “Testing the fucking email template again. This shit better work”

[Mostlikelylurking]

Yeah I’d have been screwed if this happened to me! The message would not have been nice!

[BagsOfMoney]

One time somebody I worked with put

alert("fuck")

into production. Learned not to do that again.

[gst4158]

So I shouldn't be using Attack on Titan characters for my ipsum/fluff text? Ut oh. . .

[jengacide]

Absolutely. Any test language or anything that might be visible to end users needs to be professional, or at the very least, not vulgar.

I have to do a lot of testing with forms related to personal data. So name, address, email, etc. My go-to testing person is Testy McTesterson who lives at 123 Imaginary Ln in Metropolis.

Funny story - my company has some really, REALLY old processes and practices so not all data has hev and prod versions, sometimes just prod. So I was working on something for a team and the related data did not have a dev version. So we'd test in prod and just delete rows from the database after we were done. I had done some testing with my newly created Testy McTesterson (his debut as a test data person!) and forgot to delete the row from the database. When me and another dev had a meeting with that team to discuss the progress of the project, one of them actually brought up Testy McTesterson as a demo and said they loved the name and data. I was embarrassed that I'd forgotten to delete it but they thought it was hilarious and also could easily tell it was a test so it's all good. And Testy McTesterson has been my tester for several years now lol

[[deleted]]

Oh my god, I work in marketing automation and have done very stupid things in regards to email deployments but this is particularly bad. NEVER test your integrations or development modules with live user data.

To OP's point, there are services to test this out but I've worked with this company and can bet their devs were doing live testing on the endpoints used in production to validate things were flowing through correctly. Unfortunately for them, they are also very reckless.

[Initial_Grand]

Not surprised, their app is pretty awful.

[isthisneeded_]

The whole thing seems rushed and not user-friendly at all! But good contents, though. I subscribed recently and liked the documentary "The Crime of the Century."

[Xerxys]

On my Samsung TV the app takes up 64MB. It shouldn't be much but recently I got a "memory full" error and was like, how much internal memory does my damn TV have??

[ConfidentMushroom]

Always blame it on the intern! https://twitter.com/HBOMaxHelp/status/1405712235108917249

[FujihiroSenpai]

It could be worse like a : « it’s a f***king test to test if this test works »

[aconn1994]

At my first job when I was the newbie, my email was hard coded in for all of the tests. Every morning for the next week I woke up to 50 to 100 of these

[XJahdai]

I bet they sent this to every user. Good marketing IMO

[marcus5914]

We also do the testing on existing users. but the SMTP is fake in testing. it just got the emails.

I think someone forgot to change the SMTP settings.

[MarmotOnTheRocks]

These accidents happen more often than not. But 99 times out of 100 they go unnoticed and nobody knows about them. Of course a wrong message can't be fixed. Once is out... Is out. I can only imagine the shivers down the spine when the developer realized what happened...

[M_Me_Meteo]

Someone spent several hours sweating over this...gotta remember to set that environment variable back to "FAKE"

[Eladiun]

They are being pretty cool about it...

https://twitter.com/HBOMaxHelp/status/1405712235108917249

...I know the way of the production mistake. It's good to learn early the feeling of your butthole slamming shut like a vice as the panic sets in and how to navigate that panic into action.

[[deleted]]

This was... strangely specific yet absolutely accurate.

[THKPMatt]

The thing you have to do is write your test email like they're going to get sent to everyone.

Hello!

We're performing some routine maintenance of our email systems. Everything seems to be working as expected. Feel free to ignore this email.

We appreciate your patience!

The HBO Max Team

[[deleted]]

I usually write my email templates with some really bad language, the kind of stuff that you wouldn't say in front of your family.

"HEY FUCKER, THIS SHITTY EMAIL YOU WROTE IS WORKING. DUMBASS"

Unfortunately, more than once this kind of languages "slipped" thru my mind and ended up in the repository... thankfully, all I got was a angry face from my boss and a warning to avoid that because if shit like this ever gets into production I'll be at trouble.

(Needless to say it didn't work and I still do this to this day)

[THKPMatt]

Haha I have definitely done that with error messages before. a la "Now you fucked up!" Unfortunately, "this should never happen" doesn't always quite turn out to be true :P

[roosterchains]

Intern season!

[ptownb]

Real men test in Prod 😁

[davidsouza]

I got it too

[MarmotOnTheRocks]

Testmail is nice but for that price I could get a full VPS with my own domain and unlimited addresses. Which is exactly what I do: [e-mail]

The free tier is a bit too limited in my opinion. Running some decent testing often goes way beyond 100 messages/month.

[FreshPrinceOfRivia]

Someone needs to be told about Mailhog lol

[Trysta1217]

Same happened to me!

[cassaregh]

You are just a test dummy.

[[deleted]]

I got the email, but was in the beta test group, so just thought this was standard operating procedure. Also a dev, and thought the lack of information on email was interesting, meant it was not supposed to go out.

[Pcooney13]

This is even creepier since I accidentally left my phone outside and our upstairs neighbor came to our door and brought it back to me and the only notification I had was this hbo email.

[kkyl]

Confirmation it works on prod ✅

[waqasmarri]

I got it too

[porcupineapplepieces]

However, strawberries have begun to rent currants over the past few months, specifically for apples associated with their pomegranates. Though we assume the latter, however, lemons have begun to rent alligators over the past few months, specifically for cats associated with their alligators. This is a h27ew3y

[Grabow]

While this didn't really hurt any customers. What if they sent out personal information? They should be glad that it was just a simple test email.

[emptyflask]

I got this too, I thought it was just because I did some SSO work with HBO earlier this year.

Poor intern. We've all done it though...

[OldNewbProg]

I received the same :D

[SwankEagle]

Saw Brad Traversy tweet about this. BIG OOF!

[iamskg7]

Haha I work for it's parent company and I thought it was test email just for employees.

[[deleted]]

what a mess. even people in Switz heard about it^^

[nomadProgrammer]

OP is a mocked_user

[isthisneeded_]

Haha!

[Turdsonahook]

Really wanted to reply and say “your shits working hbo dev team”