What's wrong with our e-mail system?
Topic(s): Floundering Users
Submitted by: asitnik – Tue, 11/03/2009 – 14:08
Over the past week, two support requests arrived from different users with difficulties sending e-mail. Both had attempted a few times to resend the same messages with returning errors from the server.
Since 95% of our e-mail woes are malformed addresses (yes, user error at some point), the first thing to check was to where they were sending.
Both cases were almost identical: an extra letter added to the address name, in one case spelling "schoools".
What really bothers me is that the users were using our Exchange system, either via Outlook client or Outlook Web access and both addresses are in the global Address List. Of course I showed the users how to use the Global Address List and how to remove the wrong autocomplete entries.
In any case, this is just another point to prove that although the system fails, in most cases the user initiates the failure - the autocomplete entry here.
Comment: Come back when you aren't on LSD
You must be hallucinating if you think users read error messages!
I've dealt with this many a time. The prime offender was guilty of it at least a dozen times, almost always from misspelling the same name.
Always the same problem "The e-mail is broken. Fix it." The only time the e-mail truly was broken was the one time he broke it. (And he broke it badly--changed the DNS record to point to a new web host--orphaning the e-mail. Of course it didn't come back up until the fix had time to propagate.)
Loren Pechtel – Tue, 11/03/2009 – 20:54
Comment: Gender?
Just a reminder... as my English teacher would say: "Words have gender, people have sex". So in this case, it's "the Sex Thing", not "the Gender Thing".
CAPTCHA: NUMT: I'm numb t' it, too...
SelfGovern – Wed, 11/04/2009 – 15:12
Comment: "He" and "she" are words...
Therefore I would think that your English teacher would agree that this is a Gender Thing.
macaodha – Thu, 11/05/2009 – 10:43
Comment: Watch the Gender Thing
I must take you to task on this snippet of your comment "...was the one time he broke it..."
This might (quite rightly in my view) upset the ladies who always like to be on an equal footing to the fellows. I was taught that when in doubt on this point it was always safer to defer to the fairier sex. Following this logic, it would then be preferable to say "...was the one time she broke it... and she broke it badly...".
Unless of course it really was a 'he' but that's highly unlikely isn't it.
JustaMinute – Wed, 11/04/2009 – 09:05
Comment: spelling is gender unspecific
every letter/digit counts. one(1) and zero(0) are components of binary(2). gets better/worse: what about 'sign' (+-) ?... idiot complains that zero means 'nothing'. I pointed to a VU meter with '0' meaning 1.23V RMS in 600 ohm based audio measurement. blank/empty/zero response... spelling and math are alike because one must know the approximate answer. spelling is forgiving unless it's a mnemonic, but math depends on accuracy. classic: plane crashed because the tanks were filled in metric rather than imperial.
jonesy – Wed, 11/04/2009 – 14:22
Comment: I thought this was our problem, but
Whe I got a call from my church secretary that she and our senior pastor could receive, but not send E- Mail, I thought this was our problem. But he problem turned out (after lots of troubleshooting) to be caused by the CA Firewall program that the ISP provided.
RetiredTwice – Thu, 11/05/2009 – 07:41
Comment: Error message?
Wouldn't the text in the error message inform the sender the address was wrong?
I know we cannot expect anything from users, but especially because it is only one e-mail that is being returned, and others are able to go out fine, the logical thing to do is check the address you are sending to...