A long time ago an optimistic software developer wrote a program to process confirmations forms for the back office of a fortune 2000 company. The task itself was quite simple. The forms were already created as PDF’s and each form had file with the same base name that contained sending information. The program was run every five minutes and as an added bonus if an error occurred, it would send an email to the support group.
One of the requirements was that if for some reason the confirmation form could not be processed, it should be processed on the next run. The reason for this was that the only failure that we was really being planned for was that the Lotus Notes server may be down. Perhaps I was a bit too simplistic in my solution as it was also a tacit assumption that the data would be setup in the database correctly. I had believed if there were any confirmation forms that somehow could not be processed we could get them corrected or deleted.
When this new bit of functionality went live on production it disproved most all of my assumptions. The data in the database was poorly setup and it was impossible to get IT do assist in the correction or deletion of bad confirmations. In the morning there were a couple of poorly setup confirmations, but by the end of the day there were in the low twenties. It was embarrassing enough that the forms were not being sent out as designed, but there was one additional problem. Because this was the big go live, I had added my email address to the mailing list that should be contacted each time there was an error.
Every five minutes I would receive between two and twenty error emails. This was not a very positive beginning but it was actually worse than that – today was Friday. If this was not corrected I could expect hundreds or thousands of error emails in my account by Monday morning. It wasn’t corrected and I did have thousands of emails to delete.
The good news was on monday my account wasn’t receiving any new emails as IT had frozen my account after they saw how many emails it was receiving. I felt that it was somewhat ironic that my program would eventually lock my email account. Eventually we got most of the bugs ironed out but it did take IT almost a week to re-activate my email account.
The toughest pill to swallow was that my email account was essentially spammed by my program.