Me Too!

re: Me Too!

Simon — Thu, 08 Apr 2004 08:05:00 GMT

I'm curious why you don't use a more relational system for storing the e-mail content in exchange...

Surely you could store a message sent using exchange that went to X users on y servers just y times - or once if they all used the same storage?

You would only need to store the details about who it was delivered to, resulting in a performance increase an order of magnitude as you'd just be saying "this user got a copy of this message". You wouldn't need to store a P1 header except for those users outside of the exchange environment - the list of who got the message is available in the datastore already. Deleting messages becomes as easy as altering a record in the DB to say that it's deleted and if all references to a message are deleted add it to a list of messages to purge from the system whenever a purge is done.

It would result in dramatically less use of storage, less inter-server bandwidth and faster message access.

To support saving changes to the message you could easily either create a new base message or a delta based on the original - which would again be more efficient...

Me Too!

Scott Elkin — Thu, 08 Apr 2004 12:57:00 GMT

re: Me Too!

Larry Osterman — Thu, 08 Apr 2004 13:35:00 GMT

Umm.. That's actually the way that the messages are stored internally. Inside the message store, each of those messages to the 100 recipient in each store only occupies a single row in the underlying database.

But even though Exchange is a REALLY good email system, I don't know ANYONE who would recommend that you put all 55,000 Microsoft employee's on the same email server, especially back in the Exchange 5.5 days. At an absolute minimum, this single server would represent a massive single point of failure for the entire corporate email system.

There are multiple servers, and the Bedlam DL3 distribution list went to users on several servers. And as long as the message had to go to multiple servers...

re: Me Too!

Anonymous Coward — Thu, 08 Apr 2004 15:57:00 GMT

I have three questions on this topic:

1) The new Exchange Permissions system (circa Office XP) has a "Do Not Forward" option but not a "Do Not Reply All" one. In my opinion the latter would be infinitely more useful at curbing embarassment, confusion and unnecessary churn in day-to-day communications. Please add it! :-)

2) Why can't Outlook warn me, e.g. "This message will be sent to more than 1000 users. Are you sure you want to continue?" when I click send? It would make a lot of people think twice. (Don't answer that, I know *why*... nested DLs and private members, etc. I still want the feature though. You're Microsoft, make it happen).

3) Why weren't those distribution lists locked down so that only their owners could send mail to them? This is a feature in Exchange, right? And is it also a feature that only members of a DL can send mail to it? I'd hope so, but too often I see external Internet email coming to internal DLs. It seems like this functionality should be off by default.

re: Me Too!

Omer van Kloeten — Thu, 08 Apr 2004 15:56:00 GMT

Me Too!

We had the same thing with our distribution lists a few years ago. We had about five of them for the whole organization (thousands or addresses all together).

Someone decided to send a presentation file to all the lists which regarded the entire organization. One guy failed to open the attachement (the security setting was too high) and replied to all saying "I didn't get the file".
This was replied by a lot of people replying to all with messages like "Me too!", "Stop emailing me!", "What's up, everyone?", "X Y, I know you're responsible for this!" (X Y being a guy's name (who had nothing to do with the matter)), "All of you will be fired" (This was sent by one of the high level bosses), etc.

Eventually, they removed everyone's rights to send mail to these lists except for admins...
Another way of dealing with these kind of things... :)

re: Me Too!

B.Y. — Thu, 08 Apr 2004 16:31:00 GMT

Well, that was a pretty good test of how Exchange handles heavy loads.

You guys should test it this way more often, requiring everyone to reply-all "me too" at least twice in each test.

re: Me Too!

KC Lemson — Thu, 08 Apr 2004 16:31:00 GMT

We do a massive amount of scalability testing with millions of messages going back and forth, no worries there =)

(Yes, I know you're joking, but I wanted to say it anyway :-)

re: Me Too!

Larry Osterman — Thu, 08 Apr 2004 16:47:00 GMT

AC: #1: Rights Management (Exchange permissions system) isn't about preventing people from screwing up, Exchange has had lots of other mechanisms to prevent that (like marking DL's as restricted) since Exchange 4.0 shipped. The Exchange right management stuff is about privacy, not about preventing user mistakes.

#2: The problem is that the Exchange client can't know this. There are two aspects to this: First, the DL in question might be in a different forest, in which case it's just a custom recipient in the local forest - there's no DL membership to look at. The other reason is that DL membership can be restricted - Outlook can't see the membership list, so it can't tell how many users are on it.

#3: That is exactly the user error that happened - the developer writing the application forgot to lock the DL down and bedlam broke out. And reversing the defaults isn't a good idea IMHO - that would discourage people from using DL's and create a support nightmare - Imagine the number of calls we'd get from frustrated Exchange Administrators:

"I just created this distribution list, but my users can't send mail to it!"

The bottom line is that there's no good answer to this. If we WERE to change the default, then the 95% case would be made harder (administrators would have to check a "allow users to send to this DL" checkbox). And since most of the time users want to be able to post to DL's, administrators would get in the habit of checking the box every time they created a DL.

The bottom line is that if it's not a security risk (and this isn't), chosing the default be the one that users almost always want to do is best (IMHO).

re: Me Too!

Scott — Thu, 08 Apr 2004 17:21:00 GMT

Far be it from me to question you on a tech related matter, especially with Exchange, but #2 above doesn't seem to ring true to me.

"#2: The problem is that the Exchange client can't know this. There are two aspects to this: First, the DL in question might be in a different forest, in which case it's just a custom recipient in the local forest - there's no DL membership to look at. The other reason is that DL membership can be restricted - Outlook can't see the membership list, so it can't tell how many users are on it. "

If I right click on the DL I can select "properties" and view the members of the list can't I?

re: Me Too!

Matt Warren — Thu, 08 Apr 2004 18:33:00 GMT

This was the underlying joke from my [url="http://weblogs.asp.net/mattwar/archive/2004/03/18/92119.aspx"]Asteroid on Collision Course[/url] post.

BEDLAM DL3 Rocks!

Me Too...

Deep Thoughts... — Thu, 08 Apr 2004 21:36:00 GMT

Bedlam

Omar Shahine's WebLog — Thu, 08 Apr 2004 22:28:00 GMT

re: Me Too!

KC Lemson — Thu, 08 Apr 2004 20:02:00 GMT

Scott - yes, in many cases that's true. But in some cases such as the two that Larry mentioned (hidden membership and cross-forest), that's not possible. So perhaps it's best rephrased as "you can't *guarantee* that the client would know this."

Technically it's certainly possible to find a way to make this work - but given enough code & testing, just about anything is :-)

Austausch

O(li)-Tne — Thu, 08 Apr 2004 23:35:00 GMT

It all started one morning when someone looked at the list of DLs they were on, and discovered that they were on this mysterious distribution list called Bedlam DL3. So they did what every person should do in that circumstance...

re: Me Too!

Simon — Thu, 08 Apr 2004 20:48:00 GMT

Thanks for that Larry, not being an exchange admin I got the impression your mail storage was more along the lines of a traditional 'copy for each user' from:

"So those 15,000,000 email messages collectively consumed 195,000,000,000 bytes of bandwidth."

And assumed that if it sent it more than once, it would store it more than once.

Bedlam Brings about Bedlam

Frankie Fresh's Blog — Thu, 08 Apr 2004 23:55:00 GMT

re: Me Too!

Larry Osterman — Thu, 08 Apr 2004 21:26:00 GMT

The "bandwidth" in this case was the number of bytes of data being transferred around between the exchange servers.

For an article on how Exchange keeps it's documents, check out (Google is my friend, this was the first link I hit :)): http://www.ftponline.com/wss/2004_03/magazine/columns/askpros/

Take Outs for 8 April 2004

Enjoy Every Sandwich — Fri, 09 Apr 2004 06:09:00 GMT

Take Outs for 8 April 2004

lalala

Angie — Fri, 09 Apr 2004 06:48:00 GMT

rtetyty

re: fun with DL - "reply to all"

Steve — Fri, 09 Apr 2004 06:51:00 GMT

While not as intensive nor intrusive as this, we recently ran an exercise against our users, warning them of a potential virus that was incoming, describing it as coming from "Super-User <root@mydomain.com>", the subject line, and sample message text, and advising them not to open it (and if they did open it, not to click on the attachment).

When I created the email, the return address shown (via OE) was indeed root@mydomain.com, but the reply to: address was the entire organization's DL. (FYI: I created an HTML email that included an image from my webserver so I could read the logs to see who opened it, and included a readme.txt-space-space-space-space-space...space.html file with META redirect tags to an internal webserver's page that said "Yeah, you shouldn't have done that..." - and I could check the same logs to see who clicked the attachment.)

Suckers, umm, "errant users" that opened it, realized they screwed up, and wanted to chew me out, replied to the whole organization (4500+ on the DL) (rather than the fictious "root" account) and were promptly embarassed when everybody read their nasty comments.

A good time was had by all in our division. Senior management was not really amused, probably because they were up there in the top offenders list.

(To keep this moderately on-topic - no noticable impact to my six Exchange 5.5 servers, as the majority of good users actually deleted the mail upon receipt, and emptied their deleted items folder as well, which is something they hardly ever do!)

The t-shirt

I was there — Fri, 09 Apr 2004 21:04:00 GMT

A minor correction: the T-shirt was created by a victim of Bedlam and was sold to raise money for charity (it was around the time of Giving Campaign). I still have mine. And I still remember those two wonderful days where I got NO email at all. Nothing.

Page 23 Meme

Larry Osterman's WebLog — Wed, 21 Apr 2004 21:34:00 GMT

Why am I reading this blog entry?

Reeves Little — Mon, 26 Apr 2004 06:31:00 GMT

Please take me off this list.
(Bedlam Vetran ;)

Why am I reading this blog entry?

Reeves Little — Mon, 26 Apr 2004 06:32:00 GMT

Please take me off this list.
(Bedlam Vetran ;)

The Frustrations with Social Engineering, Even in Support

Dr. HardwareBlog — Sat, 21 Aug 2004 00:27:00 GMT

Dear Moronic Coworkers

Jeremy Zawodny's blog — Tue, 09 Nov 2004 04:19:00 GMT

Please stop replying to the new mailing list you were added to to ask why you were added. If the 40+ messages in your inbox from other confused coworkers haven't made this abundantly clear, nobody knows. And we're all sick of hearing about it. There are over 3,000 of us. I fail to understand how this sort of thing happens. This is almost 2005! Have you never used e-mail before? Do you not understand that a ton of us are...

Microsoft's Bedlam DL3 mailing list ordeal

Grubbykid.com :: Links — Tue, 09 Nov 2004 07:48:00 GMT

Microsoft's Bedlam DL3 mailing list ordeal...

???????? ?? ???????????????? ?????????? ????????... :: Me Too!

TrackBack — Tue, 09 Nov 2004 10:46:00 GMT

???????? ?? ???????????????? ?????????? ????????... :: Me Too!

Bedlam

Ennuyer.net: Boring and Annoying — Tue, 09 Nov 2004 18:36:00 GMT

Me Too! This is some funny stuff....

egrigg p.i.

elizabeth grigg — Tue, 16 Nov 2004 01:49:00 GMT

as in "magnum" Today I finished my important-and-urgent list early, and moved right onto my important-but-not-urgent list. At the top of that is to watch some Channel9 videos already. It turned into a day of sleuthing, but never fear, my...

Bedlam DL3 (revisited)

Marcus Hass' [MS] Blog — Sat, 25 Feb 2006 01:47:42 GMT

So, I am on a few distribution lists that pertain directly to my every day job.&nbsp; I have a few others...

Another year, another post

Larry Osterman's WebLog — Wed, 15 Mar 2006 20:21:16 GMT

Well, this year I didn't miss the anniversary of my first blog post.
I still can't quite believe it's...

My own experience with Bedlam DL3....

Sorting It All Out — Fri, 17 Mar 2006 06:58:13 GMT

I was looking at Larry's anniversary blog post, and that Bedlam DL3 link brought back some memories....

Me Too!

re: Me Too!

Me Too!

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More Exchange stuff posted

re: Me Too!

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re: Me Too!

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Me Too...

Bedlam

re: Me Too!

Austausch

re: Me Too!

Bedlam Brings about Bedlam

re: Me Too!

Take Outs for 8 April 2004

lalala

re: fun with DL - "reply to all"

The t-shirt

Page 23 Meme

Why am I reading this blog entry?

Why am I reading this blog entry?

The Frustrations with Social Engineering, Even in Support

Dear Moronic Coworkers

Microsoft's Bedlam DL3 mailing list ordeal

???????? ?? ???????????????? ?????????? ????????... :: Me Too!

Bedlam

egrigg p.i.

Bedlam DL3 (revisited)

Another year, another post

My own experience with Bedlam DL3....