I need to start restricting myself.

05 Jun 2004

I’m about to have another dig at SACS IT.  Stop reading now if you don’t want to hear any more.

So, they’re a school, right?  You’d presume that they, like most other businesses, would experience peak activity sometime during the week.  You’d be wrong.

A few attacks ago, I made reference to the schools’ email system (specifically staffmail – studentmail reliably delivers all my spam quite nicely.  Scary thing is, I haven’t ever used that address for anything outside school!  Since I started checking studentmail from home, I’ve picked up 263 spam messages – I think that was about two months ago, now.  Sure, it’s well below my regular account, but then “jstreet@subdomain.subdomain.statecode.edu.au” is hardly as predictable as “josh@majorisp.net”, you would think.) — well, that’s what is currently on the “this thing sucks” list.

(n.b. I’ve decided I want to add some sections to this site for that kind of stuff – random thoughts of the moment, etc.  I’ll stop interrupting myself, now…)

So on Friday, a certain ITSS teacher sent out an email to all Cisco academy students (basically to check that it was all workingish), with a request that people replied upon reciept.  So, people did.  People the proceeded to get messages such as this one, politely sent in reply from the schools’ staff email server:

—– Original Message —–
From: “System Administrator” postmaster@sacs.nsw.edu.au
To: someone@somedomain.tld
Sent: Saturday, June 05, 2004 10:08 PM
Subject: Undeliverable: Re: test from Mr Hawkes

Your message

  To:      Hawkes David
  Subject: Re: test from Mr Hawkes
  Sent:    Fri, 4 Jun 2004 21:14:16 +1000

did not reach the following recipient(s):

Hawkes, David on Fri, 4 Jun 2004 21:11:04 +1000
    The recipient could not be processed due to congestion in the message
transfer service
The MTS-ID of the original message is: c=us;a=
;p=sacs;l=STAFFMAIL0406041111LXRJ88GJ
    MSEXCH:MSExchangeMTA:STAFF:STAFFMAIL

You really do have to wonder what kind of network congestion an email server at an academic institution can be experiencing at ten o’clock on a Saturday night…

Just for the record, I didn’t get an error when I sent my reply to the email.  That one was courtesy of Michael Dale.