If you don’t know what Bedlam DL3 means, I encourage you to read this blog entry You Had Me At EHLO… : Me Too!
Yesterday, a similar event happened, in a smaller scale though.
Someone sent an announcement email to the Bluehat Alert DL with more than 1000 members at the company. The email was actually sent from the DL itself.
Not long afterwards, somebody replied saying that the url in the announcement message was incorrect.
The sender then recalled the message and asked for recall notification to see whether the recall is successful or not. What’s the consequence of this recall? Every member of the DL (or more precisely, every Outlook client) sent a recall notification to the sender, that is the DL itself! Assuming the number of members in the DL is 1500 (the actual number should be bigger than this), the total number of message generated was 1500 * 1500 = 2.25M.
The entertaining value of this message recall incident is not less than that of the Bedlam event. Here are some of the funny emails from people who got flooded with the recall messages:
– Whoever is testing denial of service attacks using Outlook 2007 was successful. Congratulations, we’re prepared to hear your talk at BlueHat.
– The most noteworthy that happened since the BEDLAM days is that we learned how to delete mails faster.
– By Design.