"We weren't prepared for our first taste of an enterprise-wide mail system."

My first indication that something might be wrong was when someone called to complain how slow mail was. I opened my mailfile, about 20MB at the time, and waited, and waited, for something to happen. When I could finally see my Inbox, I noticed dozens of messages, all with the same subject, from people I didn't know.

About then my pager buzzed with a message from Intelliwatch -- "There are 3000 messages in mail.box. There could be a problem." Several more pages followed.

The Notes Admin Client showed thousands of messages queued for delivery. Most had the same subject line. PcAnywhere showed a Domino server console delivering messages faster than the screen could paint. I tried deleting messages from mail.box but there were a thousand new messages before I got rid of those already in queue. I stopped the router task and savored a few seconds of peace. Mail throughout the company came to a halt as routing was stopped on all the Domino servers.

There were two sets of messages. The first had a subject line of "Request for Training". The remainder had a subject of "Re: Request for Training".

I opened a few to see what had happened.

Someone at the main office had sent the first message. He'd copied one person and a supposedly hidden mailing list named "All Domino users". That meant 15,000 people had received the first message. But when those 15,000 people had started replying with, "Why did you send me this?", and "You sent this to the wrong person.", or "Would you please take me off this list!", the servers went crazy.

After spending a couple of hours cleaning out mail boxes I re-enabled the router task on my servers, and braced myself, fully expecting a second flood of mail. A normal volume of mail happily routed to mailfiles and people on the help desk relaxed.

I called the person who'd sent the first message. The man who answered the phone sounded nervous and embarrassed even before I identified myself. It seemed he'd been interrupted while addressing the message. When he'd looked back, his Notes 5.x client had thoughtfully completed the name for him. He'd only been with the company for a week and the group name was meaningless but, since hitting the Send button, he'd heard from one vice president, several managers, a couple of mail admins, and a number of co-workers. He was no longer unknown.