The first thing I told everyone about running for President last year was that I wanted to reinstate the e-mail system and offer a user group e-mail address to everyone in the group.
I started by asking Robert DuGaue from Calweb, who host our Web site, about pointing our MX records to somewhere that can handle the e-mail for the group. He had an idea and so we went forth and implemented it. It was a Site called NX and they do Mail Exchange.
Well, I can tell you that I spent probably a whole month entering all the information that the club supplied me with. I entered over six hundred and fifty names as well as customizing special email addresses for the clubs duties. This included things like President@SacPCUG.org, Membership@SacPCUG.org, and even Info@SacPCUG.org. It was all looking good.
In the Beginning It Was Good
Members were getting very comfortable with the system. It did everything from allowing you to check your mail from its Web site to allowing a POP3 connection. You could even set it up to automatically forward all your mail to your own private e-mail address on some other system through your own ISP. This is how I set up my system.
Since I own my own domain called HullSoft and I have my own e-mail server, I check my mail from any computer that has a Web page. It is very secure, and runs from my own Internet-connected server in my house. I was getting a few initial e-mails from people asking me how to use the system, and I would simply reply with instructions on how to set up their own mailbox and instruct them on how to use it.
It also had another feature on it called automatic reply. In other words, if you received an e-mail from someone, you could have the system send an automatic reply stating that you had received their e-mail and that you would get back to them as soon as you could.
I did not like using this feature, and it bothered me when people used it and I sent them out announcements. For a couple of months, I sent out the announcements for the club, and after sending them all out, I would get back around twenty or so e-mails from people who had automatic reply set up. I knew I just sent you an e-mail, and the last thing I wanted was to get an e-mail telling me that I did.
Endless Replies
This was our downfall. One of our members had an automatic reply on her e-mail and she subscribed to a distribution list. When she got her first e-mail from the distribution, her mailbox sent out a message stating that she just got a message from them and that she would respond to them as soon as she could.
Well, everyone knows about distribution lists: you cannot send e-mail to them. It sent her back a message stating that she cannot send to a distribution list, which triggered an automatic reply stating that she got the message and she would get back to them as soon as she could.
The distribution list sent another message stating that you cannot send messages to a distribution list, and this kept going on for weeks. The user did not know how to cancel the cycle and I was out of town before I could figure out the problem and call the people at NX and tell them about it.
Overloading the System
After about a month of this e-mail sending messages back and forth between the distribution list and the person’s mailbox, the system had over 600,000 e-mails and it was growing everyday. Finally, one night after the Steering Committee meeting, I was reminded about the problem and was asked to fix it. That night I was refused a connection, and ever since then I was not able to use it and have not been able to log in since.
I tried calling the numbers on the Web site, and even sent e-mails to the people there to no avail. They seem to have simply disappeared from the face of the earth. All my e-mails have been returned with a message stating that there is no mailbox. And the number is disconnected.
Now we are back to the Drawing Board. You know this has been a known problem (with auto-reply) for years and most systems have taken steps to correct this. Unix was the first system to correct this problem and, as a matter of fact, the distribution list that this person was sending messages to probably discarded the messages it was receiving.
Even Microsoft has a solution to this. Microsoft Outlook has a feature to it that allows you to have an automatic reply message sent to people in the rules wizard and the out-of-office wizard. However, it only sends one message to each person, and does not continue repeating the message as this other system did.
Now I have to start all over looking for another system to handle our e-mail. I might start off with a system that only handles our important e-mail first and, depending on what happens then, we can look ahead and try again.
Is Anyone There?
Does anyone read this column? I have been busting my butt every month writing a column and I do even know for sure whether or not anyone is reading this. If you have read it, please come up and let me know at the general meeting or send me an e-mail at milt@hullsoft.com. I promise I will keep writing these articles like Tech Talk and this column if you respond back to me. On that note, I will see you next month.
