• rleibman (unregistered) in reply to Leon
    Leon:
    "They must have withdrawn their VC capital by entering their PIN numbers into an ATM machine."

    Probably used their VC capital to buy everyone new LCD displays and NIC cards.

    The question is if the application was written with JSP pages using the PDF format.

  • Doc Monster (unregistered) in reply to Kuli
    Kuli:
    What kind of lousy email server did they use that sends mails only sequentially? Normally this shouldn't be a problem for a common mail server.
    Four years ago most MTAs (Mail Transport Agents) didn't default to processing their mail queues in massively parallel fashion. They also didn't default to keeping a database of sites that were down in order to skip those messages in the queue and quickly find the deliverable ones. The vast majority of sites don't need it, and won't want the extra cpu/disk consumption. The MTAs could do these things, but it required a sysadmin to decide that the extra resource consumption was okay and change the configuration.

    Look at John's reply to Polly: "We're a tech startup and we don't do any bulk mailings." No one at the company intended to process large amounts of e-mail traffic, so they didn't change the mail server config from the small-scale default of processing messages sequentially (or with very limited parallelism).

    There's no reason to think they were using a lousy mail server.

    The idea that everything else in the network is infinitely scalable is depressingly common among programmers. "What? My code/config/test-procedure spammed the mail server and caused service interruption? Why, that's not abusing the server, that's a lousy server!!1" <-- TRWTF

    DM

  • Nerf Herder (unregistered) in reply to Doc Monster

    I'm sure the folks over at test.com are sick of getting my emails. I always use [email protected] when I dont feel like giving my read address.

  • Daniel (unregistered)

    If the site wasn't down at the moment, you could go to http://www.donotreply.com/ and read all the funny (and important) emails this guy gets just because some morons use [email protected] as sender-address in automatic emails.

  • AlexG (unregistered) in reply to rleibman
    rleibman:
    Leon:
    "They must have withdrawn their VC capital by entering their PIN numbers into an ATM machine."

    Probably used their VC capital to buy everyone new LCD displays and NIC cards.

    The question is if the application was written with JSP pages using the PDF format.

    No, it was XML language.

  • iToad (unregistered)

    I use [email protected]. However, I did see an article a couple of years ago which stated that this was actually a real address.

  • ; (unregistered) in reply to AlexG

    The comments here are sure full of TLA acronyms.

  • (cs)

    If John was in Argentina, was this a US or Argentinian company? If it was the latter then would the CAN-SPAM act have even be enforceable no matter what blustery threats Pam spouted? Or would having a US presence of any sort give it some teeth?

  • oncogenesis (unregistered)

    I guess it's too much to ask developers to read or even be aware of pertinent RFCs...

    Reserved Top Level DNS Names

  • Axel R. (unregistered)

    "in layman's terms it synergizes backward overflow while optimizing cardinal grammeters in addition to allowing customers to parabolize slithy toves at the least embiggoned cost possible"

    Yeah, right. This is the real WTF, the rest of the story is just a rather mundane, everyday config error...

  • FlySwat (unregistered)

    One of my first development projects implementing a web based membership management system.

    One of the features was a system that allowed a mass mail to be sent to all members in the system. There were about 7,000 members.

    After finishing the code, I decided to give it a test run. I thought I had overridden the code that returned the e-mail addresses with my own e-mail address, but due to a mistake, it instead pulled the first person on the mailing list.

    Then, due to a 2nd defect, the system stuck in an infinite loop mailing the words "Test 123" to this poor user.

    It sent over 7,000 e-mails before my outbound SMTP server died.

    I'm a much better developer now :)

  • (cs) in reply to richardchaven
    richardchaven:
    Edward Pearson:
    'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves Did gyre and gimble in the wabe: All mimsy were the borogoves, And the mome raths outgrabe. ...

    I still know it by heart...

    It's better in German .

    <PChekov>Is even better in the original Russian!</PChekov>
  • Franz Kafka (unregistered) in reply to Mogri
    Mogri:
    If the startup was entirely Argentinian, I'm curious how the (American) CAN-SPAM Act applied. Presumably the caller realized she was dialing an out-of-country number.

    Lots of people think that US law applies to the whole world. The FBI, for instance.

  • Morasique (unregistered)

    The real WTF is sdfjgi.com really isn't registered, was the keyboard mashing changed to protect the innocent?

  • Sean (unregistered) in reply to Edward Pearson

    Thank you!

  • (cs) in reply to Sean
    Sean:
    Thank you!
    Have you never read that before?
  • (cs)
    When he opened it in a web browser and got a 404, he assumed that meant the domain was unregistered, and that it was therefore safe to bombard sdfjgi.com with tens of thousands of emails.
    If he got 404, the the domain is registered for sure (except if they had some odd proxy configuration which should be fixed) as non-registered domains cannot give HTTP errors ;x
  • Anonymous (unregistered) in reply to Franz Kafka
    Franz Kafka:
    Mogri:
    If the startup was entirely Argentinian, I'm curious how the (American) CAN-SPAM Act applied. Presumably the caller realized she was dialing an out-of-country number.

    Lots of people think that US law applies to the whole world. The FBI, for instance.

    Even law firms think that. This page is like the daily wtf, but for lawyers: http://thepiratebay.org/legal

  • (cs) in reply to Aaron
    Aaron:
    akatherder:
    And you lose points for not using "cromulent".
    Can we please stop this WTF meme? It wasn't even funny the first time I heard it on the Simpsons a decade ago, and quoting TV shows isn't funny in general (and especially when they're that old).

    Don't have a cow, man. He's just trying to help embiggen our vocabularies. If you don't like it, you can eat my shorts.

  • anne (unregistered) in reply to Jon

    At our company, there was recently an incident where test emails were sent to [email protected]. (The testers were non-US citizens who didn't realize that ABC is, well, a major American broadcasting company.)

    I don't think abc.com would have noticed a couple of emails hitting their server -- but we did, since they used the ENTIRE COMPANY'S email address in the From: field. needless to say, that was a pretty confusing email until we sorted it out.

  • A. Thousand Emails (unregistered) in reply to Quietust
    Quietust:
    Sorry, you lose - the testers DID enter their real email addresses, but due to Fred having entered a bogus email address and filling up the queue with hundreds of thousands of messages (which were being delivered rather slowly due to the constantly crashing mail server at the other end), it was taking legitimate emails quite a long time to make it through the queue.
    The real WTF is that Fred complained (and demonstrated) that his e-mail alerts weren't arriving, when he himself had decided he didn't want those e-mail alerts, and had turned them off himself.
  • Jimbob (unregistered)

    Once upon a time I was working for a travel booking website and a tester thought it a great idea to enter their email address as <their_name>@<valid_isp_domain>. We shortly received a call from the irate mother of the 11 year old girl we were spamming with booking confirmation emails.

  • Rich (unregistered)

    We had some servers in restart loops. Simple shell script. The server ran in the foreground, in a while loop. if it died, it would go to next command which would send an email and loop back for restart. My boss put it out without much testing. It's fine if the server tries to start and it dies, but if you put in a config that the server wouldn't accept (which i didn't tet for before he pushed out) it just runs. I forgot about it, moved to something else, then we got nailed with 10,000 emails in about an hour. Since many of the people on the list had blackberrys, they got spammed harder, sicne the poor machine wasn't designed to deal with that kind of deluge, not in frequency of mails, storage, or UI to deal with the issue.

    We put in a simple sleep, i thought better of my testing on shell scripts, and a kludged form of it is still used today.

  • Michael (unregistered)

    Ahh, the joy of randomly picking domain names. The Guy at donotreply.com even has a Blog where he puts some of the main that he gets whenever someuse uses donotreply.com as a "bogus-mail".

    http://www.donotreply.com/ seems down at the moment, but Slashdot featured it: http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/03/21/1737248 http://consumerist.com/371600/the-man-who-owns-donotreplycom-knows-all-the-secrets-of-the-world

    and for the german speaking audience: http://www.heise.de/security/news/meldung/105427

  • Dan (unregistered) in reply to FlySwat

    A friend worked for a very large international company and was working on a system to SMS sales reps their daily sales figures every hour on the hour so they didn't always have to call in.

    After months of testing they went live and it was great, except the head of sales was complaining he never got any SMS's. Months later they found a typo in his cell number. They'd been sending summaries of tens of millions of dollars of sales to the wrong cell number.

    Opps.

  • Anonymous Cow-Herd (unregistered) in reply to anne
    anne:
    but we did, since they used the ENTIRE COMPANY'S email address in the From: field.

    I'm hoping that's a small company, otherwise having a publicly-reachable address for "everyone" would be TRWTF.

  • nk (unregistered)

    I like how in the us they prohibit spamming but allow people to carry guns.

  • nazi (unregistered) in reply to wingcommander
    wingcommander:
    Everyone knows that VC capital should be used to buy Aeron chairs and foosball machines.
    VC capital?

    Do you retrieve that from the ATM machine with your PIN number?

  • (cs) in reply to wingcommander
    wingcommander:
    Everyone knows that VC capital should be used to buy Aeron chairs and foosball machines.
    That must have been why the dot-bomb I worked for collapsed, then. We bought Aeron machines and foosball chairs.

    In retrospect, we should have noticed the error every time we sat down; but those were heady times, and perhaps we didn't sit down often enough.

    Odd to think that both the start-up in question and VISA were formed by hiving off the cream of Bank of America's technical wizards (both PHB and code monkey), yet one is now a multi-billion dollar corporation and the other is a sad repository for orphaned Aeron machines and foosball chairs.

    (The core product was based on a re-invention of MUMPS, btw. A fitting commentary on the frothy nature of the bubble, I think.)

  • PublicLurker (unregistered) in reply to richardchaven
    richardchaven:
    Edward Pearson:
    'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves Did gyre and gimble in the wabe: All mimsy were the borogoves, And the mome raths outgrabe. ...

    I still know it by heart...

    It's better in German .

    And it's MUCH better in the original Klingon.
  • Pitabred (unregistered) in reply to Doc Monster

    Not just everything else in the network. Lots of freshly minted "programmers" see no problem with checking a setting from a file in every pass of an inner loop. "caching" is for pansies. We actually just let a guy go because of that kind of stuff... his code ran amazingly slow because he did so much repeated processing and expensive function calls inside of inner loops. Not to mention it pretty much just not working very well in general, it broke a ton of other things on it's way down. Programmers who haven't ever actually paid attention to what a system is are often very quick to allocate new objects on the stack or just call a function to get something they need when they need it without ever thinking about the other ramifications of doing so.

  • John (unregistered) in reply to scotta
    scotta:
    #1) The nice man at [email protected] was really pissed at how much test email he was getting

    I've been using "[email protected]" for over 10 years as my "you need an email address to sign up to this site and we're probably going to spam the fuck out of you once you do" email, for sites that don't have email validation.

    I've often wondered if the guy who owns joes.com ever looks at his email logs.

    CAPTCHA: eros. That's hot. (and so are the JLH videos on joes.com right now)

  • Harrow (unregistered) in reply to nk
    nk:
    I like how in the us they prohibit spamming but allow people to carry guns.
    We use the guns to enforce the prohibition on spamming.

    -Harrow.

  • Funkula (unregistered)

    [email protected] is my address for those situations. Given that the purpose of the site is to provide anonymous logins for whatever, I assume they don't mind.

  • Harrow (unregistered) in reply to real_aardvark
    real_aardvark:
    ...but those were heady times, and perhaps we didn't sit down often enough.
    Too busy playing Aeron, I presume.

    -Harrow.

  • SomeCoder (unregistered) in reply to John
    John:
    scotta:
    #1) The nice man at [email protected] was really pissed at how much test email he was getting

    I've been using "[email protected]" for over 10 years as my "you need an email address to sign up to this site and we're probably going to spam the fuck out of you once you do" email, for sites that don't have email validation.

    I've often wondered if the guy who owns joes.com ever looks at his email logs.

    CAPTCHA: eros. That's hot. (and so are the JLH videos on joes.com right now)

    I use [email protected] or the harsher [email protected]. Depends on how upset I am at the site asking for my email address to just spam me :)

  • nhfdosanvo (unregistered) in reply to n9ds

    Your regexes are broken

  • mg (unregistered) in reply to FlySwat

    Well this is not properly email related.

    I worked on a project where we customized an email server to allow users to send sms through their email client. It worked for a couple of years with no problems until one day the message queue management got crazy and one message didn't get out of it.

    Nobody knew anything about it until our customer received its phone bill the next month...

    Well, we discovered we sent the same SMS message 4.000 times to one of their clients mobile phones. She had to change SIM card and number for that... as there are no spam filters for it!

  • belg4mit (unregistered)

    Well someone's a moron for not knowing what 404 actually means.

  • Mister (unregistered) in reply to Leon
    Leon:
    "They must have withdrawn their VC capital by entering their personal PIN numbers into an automatic ATM machine."
    Fixed that for you.
  • (cs) in reply to FlySwat
    FlySwat:
    One of my first development projects implementing a web based membership management system.

    One of the features was a system that allowed a mass mail to be sent to all members in the system. There were about 7,000 members.

    After finishing the code, I decided to give it a test run. I thought I had overridden the code that returned the e-mail addresses with my own e-mail address, but due to a mistake, it instead pulled the first person on the mailing list.

    Then, due to a 2nd defect, the system stuck in an infinite loop mailing the words "Test 123" to this poor user.

    It sent over 7,000 e-mails before my outbound SMTP server died.

    I'm a much better developer now :)

    It's 1970s technology. It amazes me that it's still in use. That absurd fact probably still amazes Eric Allman.

    For some reason, we appear to be stuck with 1970s technology here. It's not like it was any damn good in the 1970s, for chrissake. It's kind of like disco before the glitter ball.

    Why are we still putting up with this crap?

  • (cs) in reply to Lastchance
    Lastchance:
    richardchaven:
    Edward Pearson:
    'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves Did gyre and gimble in the wabe: All mimsy were the borogoves, And the mome raths outgrabe. ...

    I still know it by heart...

    It's better in German .

    <PChekov>Is even better in the original Russian!</PChekov>

    Well, I already knew that the original Russians were Swedish. (Not too far out from Stockholm, if you care to look at a map.)

    However, the inspiration for Charles Dodgson's poem was in fact Anglo-Saxon.

    I'm having trouble looking this up on the Web, which shows how much fucking use that is, but the whole thing is basically a parody of an Anglo-Saxon saga. (Written when he was twenty-three, apparently. We should all have so much time in between fighting off slithy WTFs.)
  • Cromulent SAMO (unregistered) in reply to cowboy_k

    nobody has bothered to purchase sdfjgi.com yet?

  • null (unregistered) in reply to Jon
    Jon:
    The Real WTF: example.org is reserved for testing, so there's no situation where you should be randomly picking domains.

    No, the real WTF is that example.com is the test domain, but a comment with the wrong domain got highlighted.

  • (cs) in reply to null
    null:
    Jon:
    The Real WTF: example.org is reserved for testing, so there's no situation where you should be randomly picking domains.

    No, the real WTF is that example.com is the test domain, but a comment with the wrong domain got highlighted.

    Does anybody but me worry about the email servers on example.org or net or com or whoopsie?

    I mean, it's not like you have to have an email server on the other end. Given the state of today's Net, you're in for a huge blizzard of pointless test emails.

    Even if all you do is to open a listening socket -- how much damn hardware does this involve?

  • Brent Seidel (unregistered) in reply to SomeCoder
    SomeCoder:
    John:
    scotta:
    #1) The nice man at [email protected] was really pissed at how much test email he was getting

    I've been using "[email protected]" for over 10 years as my "you need an email address to sign up to this site and we're probably going to spam the fuck out of you once you do" email, for sites that don't have email validation.

    I've often wondered if the guy who owns joes.com ever looks at his email logs.

    CAPTCHA: eros. That's hot. (and so are the JLH videos on joes.com right now)

    I use [email protected] or the harsher [email protected]. Depends on how upset I am at the site asking for my email address to just spam me :)

    Try using [email protected]

  • (cs) in reply to real_aardvark
    real_aardvark:
    For some reason, we appear to be stuck with 1970s technology here. It's not like it was any damn good in the 1970s, for chrissake. It's kind of like disco before the glitter ball.

    Why are we still putting up with this crap?

    Oh look, it's one of those rugrats who masturbate to issues of Wired magazine. How cute.

  • skully (unregistered)

    I was amused to receive the below who, having accidentally emailed this customers, probably had that jubilant Woot smacked the hell off his face by an angry boss when he got back from the long weekend...

    From: notifications-noreply@[a hosting company I use] Reply-To: dev@[said hosting company] To: [my personal email address] Subject: Test Date: Thu, 3 Jul 2008 18:36:37 -0700 (21:36 EDT)

    Test Test Test!!! ITS JULY 4TH, and this is THE LAST THING I gotta do! Woot! See ya!

  • Spudd86 (unregistered)

    Extra WTF: the American invoking an American law with someone they KNEW was not in the USA, or even on the same continent, since I'm pretty sure you can't be extradited for spamming. (They must have known since they phoned)

  • Anon (unregistered) in reply to null
    null:
    No, the real WTF is that example.com is the test domain, but a comment with the wrong domain got highlighted.

    Have you ever even looked at example.com? EVER?

    You have reached this web page by typing "example.com", "example.net", or "example.org" into your web browser.

    These domain names are reserved for use in documentation and are not available for registration. See RFC 2606, Section 3.

    In other words you're the ones whose wrong, next time when you don't know something just don't say anything.

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