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Journal eno2001's Journal: TRULY EVIL: IT Wars 22

Journal by eno2001
The message below was sent to me by non-technical staff member where I work. She is subscribed to the Sports Illustrated Extra Listserv. We have a Barracuda Spam Firewall to combat the spam problem. It works quite well, but it needs some maintenance from time to time. Anyway... the Barracuda flagged their listserv messages as spam since I was unaware of the mailing list and sent them bounces. As a result, they automatically unsubscribed her (which is understandable). I whitelisted their messages so this shouldn't happen again, but it was really based more on content than something being wrong with our mail system. However... look at the level of hostility within the message below. It's calculated to get users pissed off at the IT staff. It's "Really Evil" (tm):

You have been automatically removed from the SIXTRA list (SI Extra Mailing List) as a result of repeated delivery error reports from your mail system. This decision was based on the automatic error monitoring policy in effect for the list, and has not been reviewed or otherwise confirmed by a human being.

If you receive this message, it means that something is WRONG: while you are obviously able to receive mail, your mail system has been regularly reporting that your account did not exist, or that you were otherwise permanently unable to receive mail. Here is some information which may assist you or your local help desk in determining the cause of the problem:

- The failing address is wwww.xxxxxxx@YYY.ZZZ. - The first error was reported on 11 May 2005. - Since then, a total of 4 delivery errors have been received. - The last reported error was: 5.7.1 550 5.7.1 Message content rejected, UBE, id=15399-01-232

PLEASE DO NOT IGNORE THIS MESSAGE. While you can of course re- subscribe to the list, it is important for you to report this problem to your mail administrator so that it can be solved. This problem is not specific to the SIXTRA list, and also affects all of your personal mail. This means that YOU HAVE PROBABLY LOST SOME PRIVATE MAIL AS WELL. Anyone trying to write to you during the same time frame will probably have received the same errors for the same reason. The SIXTRA list is but one of the many people who may have tried to write to you while your mail system was malfunctioning. DO NOT LET YOUR TECHNICAL PEOPLE CONVINCE YOU THAT THIS IS NORMAL. It is never normal for a mail system to claim that a valid, working account does not exist, just as it would not be normal for the post office to return some of your mail with "addressee unknown" when the address was written correctly. It is true that some mail systems are less reliable than others, and your technical people may be doing the best they can with the tools they have. But, ultimately, the level of service that you are receiving is the result of a business decision, and not something due to a universal technical limitation that one can only accept. Reliable mail systems do exist, and it is ultimately up to you to decide whether this level of service is acceptable or not.

Sounds to me like there's a lawyer in disguise as an IT guy who's lazy enough to not know what UBE means. I'd love to meet the !@#$%^ who authored that. So I could punch his lights out.

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TRULY EVIL: IT Wars More

TRULY EVIL: IT Wars

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  • Well, there's allways other side on every story. I use to manage a very large set of servers/firewalls connected via VPNs globaly. I'm talking about a company in the "outside entertainment" business, so there was a elevated number of "creative" people employed. "Creative" people considers all of the "supporting infraestructure" inferior to their egos, and they normally don't score very well using cars, modern washing machines, and even microwave ovens, not to mention VCRs and computers, of course. So there
    • Well... I don't have a problem with them stating that there is a problem. They are right about that. But it would have been a lot more helpful if their system sent a notification to postmaster@domain.com so I could actually see what the problem was and fix it. I do check the postmaster account daily. But, writing such an incendiary piece and sending it to my users is not a good approach. I have enough trouble dealing with my users (especially the one who copied this thing to me) due to their lack of te
      • Let me clarify:
        • You did something wrong (sure, you can blame Barracuda, the SPAM and everything else) that started this epistolar interchange with Sports Illustrated.
        • You ask for a polite way to resolve this things (Barracuda, SPAM and everything else) that started this non-sense off blocking mails for start (the system wasn't designed for this).

        Realize that, no matter how polite and patient we are, these are issues that have to be, to the least, avoided (not resolved) in multiple crude ways, be that us

        • It's true that spam blocking technology is not the ideal solution because of the posibility of false positives. But I don't attack other company's IT folks by angering their users. If the users get angry because something doesn't work. That's acceptable. If they get angry because someone (outside of the business) told them to, that's not acceptable.

          In my opinion, the only thing that needed to be changed in that message was that whole blame section. Telling the user to not accept what their own IT depar
          • Do you realize that we're working in a pretty fragile enviroment, dealing with things like SPAM and "puppy dog animations" instead off calibrating lasers to send & receive messages between planets? this whole IT business is crap, people is using it for crap (must of the time) and we're losing our nerves for crap...

            Wich points me to another thing: the other day I realized that I WAS WRONG taking the "consumer protection" approach. I came in account that the more users (there are "users" and "gurus" in e

            • Being in IT is, in many ways, the equivalent of being employed in a virtual Buildings and Maintenance Dept. Today, I had to clean up the sewage backup, which wasn't fun... Not major either, but just not fun.
          • Why not just
            1. tell your clueless users that Sport Illustrated is "obviously full of shit because you received their notice that their mailing didn't work", and tell them to complain to the mailing list
            2. whitelist the mailing list
            3. sit back and let them piss on each other
            • I'd tell the lusers that subscribing to the SI list is not a legitamate business use of their work email account. If they want to do/read such things they need to do so at home from a personal account.

              (BOFH/IT Nazi is a great way to get the more clueless lusers out of your hair, especially when it is backed up by HR and the executive team)

              (also why is it that 9/10 times the problems the PITA lusers complain about have nothing to do with things related to their job functions?)
              • Unfortunately, being subscribed to that list is part of her job. A large part of the staff is charged with subscribing to various listservs on various topics to help with work throughout the consortium. (I work for a library consortium)
            • That could have been fun if they didn't have that one nagging sentence in there, which actually made it worse:

              If you receive this message, it means that something is WRONG: while you are obviously able to receive mail, your mail system has been regularly reporting that your account did not exist, or that you were otherwise permanently unable to receive mail.

              Bastards. Oh well. It's over now. The user is re-subbed back to the list. They're whitelisted and I hopefully won't have to deal with them again. I
          • Why didn't you tell the luser to go fuck herself and stop wasting company resources on things like the SI mailing list?

            (no idea of your company's AUP)
            • That's the interesting thing. The SI mailing list is part of her job. She handles periodicals for the organization and the SI list is part of the subscription. So unfortunately, we're stuck having to make sure it gets to her.
      • Thing is I've dealt with enough utterly incompetent IT staff to have seen many of them claim something out-of-the ordinary was just normal behavior.

        Email seems to be a popular one to tell the lusers that the system just eats messages from time to time.

        Also it doesn't help that some popular email systems are broken by design, or at least easy for even knowedgable IT staff to break (Notes anyone?).
        • Yeah. I know what you mean. I think the reason this pissed me off though had more to do with the tone. I acknowledge that our spam filtering system had a false positive on their message. The real problem here is one of courtesy. I extend courtesy to any other business that might be causing my users some problems until I can determine that they AREN'T doing anything to rememdy the situation. Then I get mean and nasty if they are just sitting on their hands. I am used to getting the same from most busi

  • - The failing address is wwww.xxxxxxx@YYY.ZZZ. -
    The first error was reported on 11 May 2005. - Since then, a total of 4 delivery errors have been received. - The last reported error was: 5.7.1 550 5.7.1 Message content rejected, UBE, id=15399-01-232

    Sounds to me like there's a lawyer in disguise as an IT guy who's lazy enough to not know what UBE means. I'd love to meet the !@#$%^ who authored that. So I could punch his lights out.

    Uh... that 550 about the message being "UBE" didn't come from Sports' Illu

    • Yes. It did come from the Barracuda. The it folks on the other end should have been smart enough to know that UBE means Unsolicited Bulk E-mail. They would then have the option of reformatting their message (which is probably not an option since this is a listserv) or... they could have just sent the user a standard message saying "you've been unsubscribed due to mail bounces. Please forward this on to your mail administrator". At which point, I have no problem tracking down the problem. I DO have a p
  • Not only is this insulting, but it is also very assuming and technically false. The message states that "...your mail system has been regularly reporting that your account did not exist, or that you were otherwise permanently unable to receive mail" and "It is never normal for a mail system to claim that a valid, working account does not exist", as if the error messages it received were concrete indications that the user did not exist. Error 550 5.7.1 simply means unable to relay and your error states EXA
  • Try to take a look at the situation from the other side:
    • The message was accurate and gave the means to pinpoint the source of the problem.
    • Including plain language in UPPERCASE is unfortunately necessary these days, because due to forged sender address, many users receive so many meaningless bounces that they barely read them anymore, and many regular users are confused at what even legitimate bounces mean and what to do about them.
    • Yes, a mail to postmaster would have been nice, and you might read postmas

  • Why slashdot? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by plover ( 150551 ) * on Thursday August 04, 2005 @01:49AM (#13237815) Homepage Journal
    Other than that we're a very sympathetic ear to this kind of sh!t because we deal with it too, why don't you turn this on its ear against their listserv manager? Explain to him/her/it that you ARE on top of things, and that you're mighty busy filtering out spam. If they want their users to get whitelisted, they should ask more politely.

    And while you're at it, since you have an obviously unhappy customer who believes she's not getting all her email, why not let her have it? All of it? Remove that woman's account from the spam filter! >:-D Let her mailbox fill on an hourly basis, and let her deal with it. Perhaps explain politely to her that you're really, really sorry that the spam filter was too aggressive, and that you're turning it down for her so she'll be assured of getting everything addressed to her.

    At least then she might appreciate that spam filtering might be kind of necessary, and that maybe you have been doing something of benefit. But probably she'll just whine more. In that case buy her a ticket to "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory" and address the envelope to her as "Dear Ms. Veruca Salt".

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