The college runs a Remedy helpdesk solution. One of the deans had a problem with her computer, they created a ticket, and of course Remedy sent a copy of the ticket to her. The problem was that she had set up the out-of-office assistant on her email account, and set it up to send out the auto-response every time a message was received (not just the first time a message is received from a particular sender.) So, the out of office assistant sent back a response. The Remedy server received it and sent back a “this is an unmonitored email account” email. The dean’s email account received it and sent back the auto-response. This ping-ponged back and forth until the Exchange server’s hard drives had somewhere on the order of 50 mb of free space. The admins then caught it and disabled the dean’s account temporarily, then cleaned out both accounts.
via: [Spiceworks Community]
Picture Source: [mikecogh (CC)]
So the fail is that someone didn’t set up Exchange to handle this correctly?
Badly-configured end-user, who should’ve had the “autoreply only once to each individual email”, and badly-configured server for sending automatic replies on an unmonitored service account. If folks are dumb enough to send email to such an account, with the appropriate “Noreply” and “do not reply, account not monitored” in the informative messages sent by the server, they deserve to have their requests blackholed.
Badly configured server to not have a cap on her mailbox. Also admins should no better.