Why Vacation Rules are Bad

See if you can tell the difference between these two algorithms:

For each new email I receive, do this:
if the sender is in my address book,
create a reply to the sender with a canned message,
send it out.
done

Pretty simple, eh? Now how about this one:

For every new or old item in my entire mailbox, do this:
create a new canned message,
add everyone in my address book in the “To” field
send it out
done

Interestingly, the first one produces a fairly well behaved Vacation rule. The second one produces 133,000 messages per hour in our mail system until you delete the offending account after 90 minutes.

By the way, it takes about 10 hours to delete 200,000 email messages from three GroupWise post offices using gwcheck with the itempurg=subject switch.

This post is based on a true story.

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