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Thread ID: 130070 2013-03-25 06:03:00 Oops I just sent an email with a 1 gigabyte attachment Digby (677) PC World Chat
Post ID Timestamp Content User
1334003 2013-03-25 06:03:00 How can people send emails with attachments of thousands of names?

I wonder if they are doing it on purpose ?

Surely if you saw that you had sent such an attachment you would report it to your manager ?
Digby (677)
1334004 2013-03-25 06:31:00 For some people, it's not unusual to be sending/receiving dozens or even hundreds of emails a day - I'm sure on one of my busier days I could have easily sent upwards of a hundred emails. If you then have attachments with similar names, are under a lot of time pressure, and accidentally attach the wrong document or make a typo in an email address, it's not that difficult to make a mistake sooner or later. Fortunately the worst I've done is send an email to the wrong person within the right company after misspelling the recipient's name (and the email didn't have any sensitive information in it), but I can see how it could happen. We're all human after all.

Of course when you're dealing with sensitive matters, you need to be more careful, but accidents do happen.

One of the more unusual experiences I've had is when I sent an email to John.Smith@companyA.com, companyA happened to share an email server with companyB and because of some weird configuration they had, my emails got sent to John.Smyth@companyB.com instead. Some sort of intelligent autocorrect type functionality had decided that I must have mispelt the recipient's name, and "guessed" who it should go to - only it shouldn't have crossed domains. Exactly why that happened I don't know, since I had correctly spelt the recipient's email address all along. I only found out about this when the wrong recipient emailed me to tell me to stop sending them emails, as they had no idea what I was talking about and couldn't understand why they were CCed on the email trail.
somebody (208)
1334005 2013-03-25 06:33:00 Well, one should always be aware of what one is sending. If people are stupid enough to send things with thousands of names, then they should expect that some zombie somewhere will be laughing all the way to the nearest email inbox!

LL
lakewoodlady (103)
1334006 2013-03-25 06:52:00 How can people send emails with attachments of thousands of names?

Similarly, how can a sysadmin allow a configuration that doesn't assume the user is a complete idiot? Because mostly, they are. The mail server shouldn't have accepted a 1GB attachment, especially not to external addresses.
inphinity (7274)
1334007 2013-03-25 07:00:00 Similarly, how can a sysadmin allow a configuration that doesn't assume the user is a complete idiot? Because mostly, they are. The mail server shouldn't have accepted a 1GB attachment, especially not to external addresses.

I doubt there will be many mail servers out there that allow attachments of that size.
somebody (208)
1334008 2013-03-25 07:02:00 It was just a spreadsheet with 87k records.
It would be smaller than your average lolcat email...
fred_fish (15241)
1334009 2013-03-25 07:41:00 It'll be an autocomplete on outlook. You start typing a name and it adds the rest. The big problem is probably that the exhange administrators allow sabving on non local domain addresses (I mean most do)....so if you couldn't save "internet" addresses to your local contacts, then at least if you cocked up itd only be sent internally.

I mean it happens, in a hurry to send something off you don't check the to address properly.
psycik (12851)
1334010 2013-03-25 09:26:00 Q: What sort of a Mickey Mouse organisation uses Excel for their database?
A: EQC, led by a wally who's paid megabucks for continually stuffing things up and telling blatant lies.
TideMan (4279)
1334011 2013-03-25 09:51:00 My guess is that the excel sheet would be querying the db and filtering and formatting the ouput for the user.
The "extra" records they since discovered had been sent will have been cached in the query, unknown to the user, hence the report of a lower initial figure (still a cluster**** that should have been prevented by sensible data transmission policy).
fred_fish (15241)
1334012 2013-03-25 09:52:00 Even for private companies I would think they use Excel, it's what employee A and B know how to use, why make it more difficult. MS Office is the bread and butter software. It's really common. You might have all the procurement database on one excel file, yep ... Nomad (952)
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