[Histonet] An explanation of The Histonet Mail Loop

[Herb Hagler]

I wanted to thank those of you who have hung in there during the trials 
the last 24 hrs.

I wanted to let you know what happened:

A person that everyone is familiar with now went on vacation and left 
an "out of office" notice on their email account.  This can be a huge 
problem as we experienced first hand.  Instead of a reply to the sender 
of the email, they setup a reply to the histonet list. The reply to 
list was posted, that message was sent from histonet to the persons 
vacation reply, which replied to the list, which generated another 
response.....millions of emails later everything slowed to a crawl.

Please, please if you go on vacation and must leave a reply to tell 
everyone that you are out of the office, remember to unsubscribe from 
any list servers before you leave and give it a 30 minute test before 
you finally go out the door so you don't become known and loved by so 
many people and every server admin on the planet.

I think that you get the picture.  This was a big time mail loop which 
in a matter of a few hours filled up everyones email quotas, filled our 
admin message boxes, filled up the server, and all of this happened at 
the end of the day here in Dallas during heavy rains when everyone that 
could fix it was trying to get home.

So we think things are quiet now.  We are getting fewer bounces, so 
would some of you gentle people please begin asking your questions 
again about histology, employment and other interesting issues.

Questions about why is my mail box full of junk messages, should be 
obvious to everyone that something went wrong in geek land, and we have 
identified the problem(99% confidence) and hopefully things will return 
to normal by tomorrow afternoon when I switch the server from manual to 
auto.

Thanks and cheers,
Herb


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