At 4:00am my phone rang. People couldn't get into email. Those who had email open couldn't send anything. As I dragged the laptop out of its bag I heard the cat bat my pager off the table. I connected to the site to see what was wrong.

I had the names of four people reporting problems. I located the mailfile for the first user and noticed it had exceeded its quota. Though the file would still receive mail, Mail Attender prevented the user from creating or sending new messages. I told the user to delete what he didn't need and compact the file while I checked further.

The three users I spoke with said the problem had started about 3:30am. A few messages struck them as "odd". All of them showed a sender's name followed by "Sent by: Phil Smith". I opened Phil's file in the Designer Client to see what he'd done.

Phil had created a "Send Document" agent with a "Before new mail arrives" trigger named "mail stuff home". But the Send Document command didn't allow him to specify an address so anything new was automatically sent back to the original mailing list. I noticed Phil had disabled the agent at 3:43am so there didn't seem much to worry about.

I retrieved my pager and drove to the office, still expecting a quiet day. Halfway there, I regretted taking the pager away from the cat.

More people were reporting problems. Now they were getting "btreive" errors when they tried to open mail. I didn't even know Domino used btreive. In a panic, I called Lotus Support.

The tech sounded so calm as he asked me to check disk space on the servers. Honestly, it hadn't occurred to me to check even though I knew the servers were low on space.

One mail server had 150MB free. The other had a mind-boggling 250KB. I went back to Phil's mailfile to see how he'd used up several gigabytes of server space in a mere 15 minutes.

It seemed Phil had tried to send a 600MB attachment to 50 people, including his home email account. The SMTP gateway, with a limit far below 600MB, had bounced the message, with attachment, back to Phil. His agent sent it out again, to all 50 addresses, only to have the gateway return it again, and so on.