CEO Thinks He Knows Better Than IT Worker When It Comes To Emails, Ends Up As The Laughing Stock Of Everybody He’s Ever Respected

We’ve all been there before, some higher-up has a great idea without the technical ability to know that it’s a disaster-in-waiting. No matter how much people protest, they just have to have their way. So all that’s left to do is comply and hope that if they can’t learn from advice, they can at least learn from their mistakes.

An internet user shared one such situation where no amount of protest could dissuade a CEO from making some changes to an email system. So they did as instructed, then detailed the almost apocalyptic fallout of the CEO’s demands.

We reached out to the OP to learn a bit more about the story and they were gracious enough to answer our questions. How does one actually go about solving this mess? “I had to make sure all the other companies affected were not crippled as well. Sometimes those did not even have server admins, just guys who knew the password. This also meant we had to subcontract people around the globe to help. Between Christmas and New Year's eve...
Then there was getting the company domain removed from all the blacklists within a few days. And checking if any of our IP addresses had been blacklisted too. And then changing IP addresses. Also, there was some investigation work trying to find out if important mails with legal deadlines had been sent and received and so on... all during the holiday season on minimal staff.”

What this CEO had implemented by accident bears some similarities to what is referred to as an email bomb. If that sounds particularly war-like, just wait, email terminology gets wild. Back to the point, an email bomb is either a program or other method that sends so many emails to a particular address, that it simply stops functioning. Normally, this is part of a DoS, or denial-of-service, attack, which is aimed to shut down its target. Normally, professional IT teams have measures in place to prevent an email bomb from detonating.

Now, technically, this CEO created an email storm or a ‘reply allpocalypse’. Even tech experts are not immune, for example, a Microsoft employee in 1997 emailed a list containing 13,000 email addresses. Others in the list started to reply, causing a cascading wave of emails, which was later estimated to cap at 15 million emails and 195GB of traffic, which was pretty significant back in the day. In 2016, the UK National Health Service NHSmail system experienced over 500 million emails in roughly one hour after an IT worker sent a “test mail.” Goes to show that even professionals make mistakes.

If an email bomb sounded aggressive, then let's take a look at the protocol wars. This is not something out of the Matrix or TRON, rather, it's a really mundane debate from the 1970s and 1980s over which communications protocols would be best for this emerging technology called the internet. It was followed by the Internet–OSI Standards War in the late 1980s. The military terminology does at least have a somewhat logical origin, as the internet came about from a United States Department of Defense project in the 1960s. Now it's so commonplace, even household appliances might be connected, leading to humorous situations where Google server outages prevent smart home users from turning off the lights.

Email has slowly become a default communication method both privately and between businesses. While messaging apps have replaced emails for communicating shorter bits of information, globally we still send around 350 billion, with a b, emails daily. Some experts predicted the death of email before 2020, but working from home and the general force of habit has kept it alive and well. After all, it's a lot easier to ignore an email than a phone call.