* A story of e-mail system downtime
A member of our survey panel sent me information on his company’s experience with e-mail system downtime. Here is a lightly paraphrased version of what he sent me:
“I just looked through my calendar to see when I last had an unscheduled e-mail system outage. It was on Aug. 10, 2002. We diagnosed the problem as a ‘corrupted’ or strange character header record on an e-mail that got stuck, and when I rebooted the server, the system wouldn’t load and held up the other programs from loading. Once we identified that e-mail and moved it out of the way to a temporary spot and rebooted the server, everything worked fine.
“The e-mail in question went to the president/managing partner of my company. It was a newsletter from a foreign newspaper and we think the strange character was just a letter that the e-mail system couldn’t interpret or handle properly. A similar newsletter letter came in a while later and caused the same problem.
“I called up my IT guy, told him I think it happened again, and he was able to come over the next morning on his way into his office, fix the problem in 15 minutes, because he knew where to look, and didn’t have to troubleshoot the issue. We installed the e-mail system update at a later date and the problem never reoccurred.
“I remember this incident well because that was the only unscheduled e-mail system outage ever!!!! I’m sure customers of other e-mail systems don’t have that kind of reliability and stability.”
Two questions: a) what e-mail system do you think this is and b) has anyone else ever had their e-mail system operate for more than five years without a downtime incident?
