The 2004 Mail Crash: Anatomy of a disaster

Dateline Oxford: 24th of May, 12:42
Nathan Hill logs into a college computer as he has done hundreds- if not thousands- of times before.

13:02
Having finished his necessary tasks, he prepares to log off. Daunted by the prospect of electromagnetism problem sets, he decides to take this opportunity to empty his Junk Mail folder. Investigation shows that there are approximately 7 000 messages.

Context: The email address associated with Physics department username was inherited from two or three people before me with the same surname. Up until this year, students were never required to check it. As a consequence, this address is as dirty as they come. Normally, the junk filter makes this an incidental.

13:04
As part of the deleting process, these messages are moved from the mail server to the user domain. This means my memory usage goes from around 100 mb to 201 mb, exceeding the user memory allocation. This causes the Mail application to �hang�, so that it can no longer delete messages.

13:07
The first crash.

13:15
Nathan manages to log in to a new computer. His memory usage is now 255 mb, and Mail reports that he now has 14 000 junk messages and begins trying to delete them.

13:22
On his third computer, Nathan manages to turn off wallpapers and delete his temporary internet files and saved audio files. His memory usage is now 322 mb.

13:38
By logging into the webmail interface, Nathan deletes all the messages he can reach from there- about 150 or so. The rest, or course, are associated with the user hilln on the college server.

14:41
Memory usage is now about 400 Mb, and there are 25 000 junk messages. In frustration, Nathan starts to tinker with Library files in the hope that he can delete the messages without starting Mail. Although he is now on his fifth computer and has not started Mail, the files in question cannot be deleted as they are �in use�.

14:47
Nathan remembers that he has to hand in an Electromagnetism problem set in three hours. Current mail count is 27 000. Nathan resolves to get his Physics department email address changed.

Song in my head: "That Monty Python sketch where a group of vikings sing �Spam, spam, spam, spam, spam�.