ECN Forum Forums Technical Discussion Re: Computers and the Internet High speed communication

The wonder of e-mail has revolutionised communication.

Last Thursday a bank employee in Sweden sent an internal sex-joke to a coworker. ("I've had sex in office...") Unfortunately, she sent it not to her coworker but to someone with the same name, who didn't realise that it was just a joke. Instead she forwarded it to her friends. Today, less than a week later, the majority of Swedish e-mail users have received it, including the original posters full name and place of work.

Something worth thinking of before you hit the Send button. You could become (in)famous over night...

C-H,
Now that IS a worry!.
I bet that that woke a lot of people up in Sweden, regarding just how easily something like this can snow-ball.

[This message has been edited by Trumpy (edited 05-05-2003).]

Yes,

It is important to check email addresses and settings. I sent an email to someone once and they called later that day screaming all kinds of things and had sent me a pile of nasty and threatening emails because they had received thousands of copies.

When we took a look it was pointed out that they all had the same timestamp on them which meant it was only sent once. It turned out that he had set one email address to send a copy to another email address which sent a copy back to the first one, - again and again ... and again.

I'm still waiting for that apology.

Bill

How on earth did that happen, Bill?.

That reminds me of a problem that cropped up on some of the earlier digital telephone exchanges with call forwarding.

Subscriber A set his line for calls to be forwarded to B, B forwarded to C, and C had calls forwarded to A. When somebody made a call to any one of those three numbers the system went crazy trying to forward the call indefinitely around the loop! If one or more of the subscribers was in a different CO, a whole trunk group could be busied out in a flash!

The software had been written to prevent B forwarding to A if A had calls forwarded to B, but apparently nobody had thought of the possibility of this happening with three or more numbers.