51–60 of 83 posts
Some nice nostalgia for me -In high school we walked to that exact KFC for lunch and would discuss the previous nights antics playing StarCraft broodwar. -I used to fix computers (professionally) at a store on the same street as that gas station as an after high school job -In Dec/jan 2010 I worked 18 hours a day laying floors in the new RIM buildings at Philip/Colombia. A friend’s dad did a lot of the furniture movi…
That random “J” at the end of the messages brings me back to mail circa 2010. As I recall, iOS also didn’t render Outlook’s smileys right, leaving a bunch of Js in mail from my Mom. (For the ones who ‘missed’ it: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20060523-10/?p=31... )
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't understand why this isn't configurable. Why can't the basic data structures (of one email after another in serial) be displayed in either order depending on mail client settings? Admittedly I haven't looked into it because I'm perfectly fine with top posted emails. But I routinely sort files in my directory. Why not emails in a displayed thread?
It's people quoting text, not threads of messages. The ability to semantically parse text to determine what order paragraphs should be displayed in to suit the tastes of the individual reader is a very recent development. Or, rather, will be soon. Maybe not very soon.
If you need to address a specific point in a message you're replying to, quote just that bit.
We are emailing TBs of data around daily that provides no value to anyone.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> bottom-posting Immediate and indefinite suspension of email license.
A: Because it messes up the order of things. Q: Why is top posting bad?
- New text conversations show at the _top_ of the list of conversations - New messages are at the _bottome_ of a conversation - New emails are at the _top_ of your email client (?) - and now you remind me that email replies can be both at top and bottom (:
It feels arbitrary, but I suspect this is due to the heritage of paper, where newer things are on top of the pile, but in a given document, newer text tends to be added at the bottom/end. (it's a stretch :))
I vividly remember this incident and more like it. I was coached by my manager to never reply all to an email addressed to a larger distribution group because of this exact reason. Not only were you annoying people, but everyone's email ended up getting delayed for an hour or two. Can someone explain to me why the backlog would happen? Why they didn't have systems to protect from such a basic DOS attack?
An Exchange email message actually has TWO recipient lists – there’s the recipient list that the user sees in the To: line on their email message. This is called the P2 recipient list. This is the recipient list that the user typed in. There’s also a SECOND recipient list, called the P1 recipient list that contains the list of ACTUAL recipients of the message. The P1 recipient list is totally hidden from the user, it's used by the MTA to route email messages to the correct destination server.
Internally, the P1 list is kept as the original recipient list, plus all of the users on the destination servers. As a result, the P1 list is significantly larger than the P2 list.
For the sake of argument, let’s assume that 10% of the recipients on each message (130) are on each server. So each message had 100 recipients in the P1 header, plus the original DL. Assuming 100 bytes per recipient email address, this bloats each email message by 13K. And this assumes that there are 0 bytes in the message – just the headers involve 13K.
So those 15,000,000 email messages collectively consumed 195,000,000,000 bytes of bandwidth. Yes, 195 gigabytes of bandwidth bouncing around between the email servers.
...
So what did we do to fix it? Well, the first thing that we did was to fix the MTA. And we tried to scrub the MTA’s message queues. This helped a lot, but there were still millions of copies of this message floating around the system.
To prevent anything like this happening in the future, we added a message recipient limit to Exchange – the server now has the ability to enforce a site-wide limit on the number of recipients in a single email message, which neatly prevents this from being a problem in the future.
Here's one reference, https://www.theregister.com/2023/02/14/us_army_reply_all_sto..., though I thought they had one back in the 2010s.
I vividly remember this incident and more like it. I was coached by my manager to never reply all to an email addressed to a larger distribution group because of this exact reason. Not only were you annoying people, but everyone's email ended up getting delayed for an hour or two. Can someone explain to me why the backlog would happen? Why they didn't have systems to protect from such a basic DOS attack?
from the first Exchange Reply-All email storm, a dev who worked on the Exchange server, https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/blog/exchange/me-too/610... : An Exchange email message actually has TWO recipient lists – there’s the recipient list that the user sees in the To: line on their email message. This is called the P2 recipient list. This is the recipient list that the user typed in. There’s also a SECOND recipien…
> RIM Job
I love that this was actually the URL for their careers page in this era: https://web.archive.org/web/20101122175558/http://rim.jobs/
Some nice nostalgia for me -In high school we walked to that exact KFC for lunch and would discuss the previous nights antics playing StarCraft broodwar. -I used to fix computers (professionally) at a store on the same street as that gas station as an after high school job -In Dec/jan 2010 I worked 18 hours a day laying floors in the new RIM buildings at Philip/Colombia. A friend’s dad did a lot of the furniture movi…
Did you go to WCI too? This is all so nostalgic for me. Though I grew up in Waterloo and lived at home, yeah, the city sure has grown a ton. I moved away to raise a family.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
from the first Exchange Reply-All email storm, a dev who worked on the Exchange server, https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/blog/exchange/me-too/610... : An Exchange email message actually has TWO recipient lists – there’s the recipient list that the user sees in the To: line on their email message. This is called the P2 recipient list. This is the recipient list that the user typed in. There’s also a SECOND recipien…
Another storm hit MSFT around the start of the pandemic, https://forums.theregister.com/forum/all/2020/03/26/microsof...
see https://www.theverge.com/2020/5/10/21253627/microsoft-reply-...