I got your e-mail

By Todd Stadler · Thursday, March 10, 2005 3:16pm

One of the groups at work recently requested that we set up an autoresponder for e-mails sent to a generic e-mail address for their group. You know, the kind of thing that, when you send an e-mail to info@example.com, says "We received your e-mail and will reply as soon as possible."

For all the useful information such fake e-mail contains, it might as well say, "Beep * Transmission complete * Status=14908". I loathe these kinds of e-mails, and I can't understand why anyone thinks they're useful.

I mean, try to imagine an analagous situation with phone calls. You call a company and they don't answer, so you leave a message. As soon as you hang up the phone, you get a call back. It's a computerized voice, telling you that "This is DynoCorp's message system, and I just received your voice mail. Someone will get back to you soon about that." Well, duh. Did you really doubt that your message was recorded? Did that computerized call back reassure you?

Sure, back in the Wild West days of the Internet, I guess you were never sure that any e-mail you'd sent had actually gotten through ? maybe e-Indians had ambushed the e-Pony-Express or whatever. But I don't think that happens a lot these days.

Instead, with the ubiquity of internet connections and e-mail usage, it's now less a question of "did they get my e-mail" as "will they actually bother reading it and responding", which of course is entirely up to the potentially capricious human behind the e-mail address, and not at all a technical question.

And yet the autoresponder is not capable of sentience, much less capriciousness, so it blithely replies to everything, from gibberish medical spam to the world's most beautiful poetry, with "We received your e-mail and will reply as soon as possible."

And it's not even necessarily true! The only entity who you can be certain has received your e-mail is the autoresponder, and clearly it's not going to do much useful with your message. Will a human read your message? Maybe. Will they reply? It depends. Will it be as soon as possible? Do I even need to ask?

I guess I have a special place in my gall bladder for such e-mails because, as the person who sends out our company's e-mail newsletter (or rather, oversees the automated sending of the same), I have to scroll through screens of informationless e-mails every time we send out a newsletter. I don't mind the many "out of office" messages we also receive, because that actually tells me something I didn't know (not that I particularly care in this case), but scanning through hundreds of e-mails written by computers can get a fellow down.

I bring all this up because today, something went wrong. I'm not sure why it didn't happen before ? I guess we hadn't sent out an e-mail newsletter since we'd set up the autoresponder. Anyhow, I noticed that the generic e-mail inbox for the newsletter was filling up with dozens and dozens of e-mails, all from the same place and with the same subject line.

It was the sort of thing that strikes fear into my heart because something was clearly going very wrong, it didn't seem like it was going to stop, and it there was a good chance it was my fault. Webmasters rarely get to use their "fight or flight" responses in their jobs, but this one certainly set my adrenaline pumping. If I were starring in a show called "Web Master!", a military fanfare would have started playing at that moment.

My mind raced ? was there something wrong with the e-mail sending mechanism? No, I hadn't changed anything there, and it had been working fine for dozens of previous newsletters. But why, my mind yelled a little loudly in my ear, are a handful of e-mail addresses continually sending us these e-mails?

Your being the clever type, you've probably figured out by now what was going on. Included in our list of newsletter recipients were a few e-mail addresses that also were set up with autoresponders.

And while most "out of office" functions are clever enough to send only one e-mail saying "I'm not here" per day, all the autoresponders in this scenario were stone-cold stupid (in our case, it's because Microsoft designed it that way ? "Who needs an autoresponder that keeps track of the people it's already autoresponded to?", someone said in a meeting in Redmond).

The upshot of this all being that, for several minutes (before I finally just turned off our autoresponder), our server was having a conversation with other servers that went something like this: "I got your message." "I got your message." "Great! I also got your message." "And I got your message." "Okay. Oh, and also, I got your message." And so on.

Just two computers, carrying on their own highly repetitive ? if annoyingly polite ? conversation, and willing to carry it on into eternity, barring the intervention of any meddling webmasters.

But before I killed our autoresponder, leaving the other servers' autoresponders to wonder what had happened to their new, garrulous friend, I thought for a second about all the meaningless, perfunctory chatter going back and forth and I realized, "You know, that reminds me a lot of blogs".