Email abusers

November 30, 2010

I wish there was a way to nominate chronic email offenders for being criminally insane: and a way to put them away for good. I lost my employee ID card yesterday and promptly sent a mail to the (un)concerned authority (UA), only to receive nothing in reply.  Nothing.  No procedure to be followed..  Nothing.  Thin air.  Frustrated,  I went to the person in question today,  only to be told that my mail was  received barely an hour ago.  Now,  I know more than a thing or two about our email system (that’s an understatement: I’ve myself contributed heavily to it’s overhaul).  It’s as slick a system as they come.  It might not have a fancy graphical user interface, but it rivals the best in the business in efficiency.   Now, this ticked me off mightily.  Having full faith in the system and the people who keep it up,  I took UA on: I said that I could fetch the logs that would show the delivery when I thought it would have been delivered.  UA proceeded to call up my colleague, the mail admin who confirmed that UA’s account was over-quota, and the delivery indeed had taken place less than an hour ago.  

One question answered,  I looked at UA for the reason for the quota problem.  UA claimed that it (appropriate, I think)  deleted all its unwanted mail judiciously,  each day.  Then, I  saw a mail in UA’s inbox which stood out from all the other ones.  Size of attachment? 153 MB.  Now,  what kind of demented,  perverted person sends an email which is 153 MB in size??  I promptly told UA that it was indeed its fault: if it can’t have a say in what its friends’  send it on its official email id,  it cannot excuse itself for not receiving mail it should be receiving.   And it still seems to think that it’s not its fault.  

Email abusers should be labeled criminally insane and put away,  and their partners in crime,  those who say nothing when their friends go around merrily abusing systems should get the business end of a boot too.