[HN Gopher] Rim/Blackberry tales - reply all
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Rim/Blackberry tales - reply all
Author : cloudedcordial
Score : 139 points
Date : 2024-11-13 03:18 UTC (6 days ago)
(HTM) web link (awadwatt.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (awadwatt.com)
| 486sx33 wrote:
| Some nice nostalgia for me
|
| -In high school we walked to that exact KFC for lunch and would
| discuss the previous nights antics playing StarCraft broodwar.
|
| -I used to fix computers (professionally) at a store on the same
| street as that gas station as an after high school job
|
| -In Dec/jan 2010 I worked 18 hours a day laying floors in the new
| RIM buildings at Philip/Colombia. A friend's dad did a lot of the
| furniture moving. Both of us made over $4000 a week in our early
| 20s
|
| -Now out of those 4 buildings I think black berry only has two
| floors of one building
|
| -Waterloo has seen serious decline since the death of RIM
|
| -Not sure it will ever come back, most people including myself
| left years ago.
|
| -there has been a serious condo tower boom, but that sucks for
| "walkability" and it's radically changed the area
|
| -if you attended university in Waterloo in the 2000s and lived
| off campus, wherever you lived is likely gone and there is a
| condo tower there now.
| Waterluvian wrote:
| Did you go to WCI too? This is all so nostalgic for me.
|
| Though I grew up in Waterloo and lived at home, yeah, the city
| sure has grown a ton. I moved away to raise a family.
| cloudedcordial wrote:
| Username checks out haha!
| morkalork wrote:
| The wild thing about the condo boom in Waterloo is 77% of units
| are owned by investors. It truly exemplifies the mess that is
| the housing market. Rentors can't break into it and homeowners
| are doubling, tripling up on properties.
| apercu wrote:
| That's a lot of SW Ontario now. I've moved back to the US due
| to the high costs of the GTA, but a lot of my friends in
| Toronto own multiple condos.
| Miraste wrote:
| The Canadian housing market is apocalyptic. It's hard to
| think of a greater regulatory failure.
| nazcan wrote:
| Density has hurt walkability?
| toast0 wrote:
| A dense housing boom could hurt walkability if it replaced
| mixed low density retail and housing and if there was no
| compensating retail boom near housing.
|
| First floor mixed use retail can address this, but sometimes
| those spots sit vacant because of cost or other issues with
| rhe space.
| dddddaviddddd wrote:
| I have no specific experience with Waterloo, but sometimes
| towers follow a Corbusian ideal of a tower surrounded by
| nothing; or worse, a tower surrounded by high-speed
| roads/highway -- essentially a stacked bedroom community with
| no walkable amenities.
| cldellow wrote:
| FWIW, I live in the region and disagree with OP's
| characterization of "serious decline" and "most people have
| left".
|
| I went to school here from 2003-2008, moved away and moved
| back in 2011.
|
| The area's population has increased by ~20% since 2012
| (~the death of RIM, according to its stock price). In 2011,
| it got regional train service to Toronto. In 2019, it got a
| local light rail train.
|
| The university area that the OP seems to be referring to
| is, IMO, more walkable and bikeable now than before. Some
| of the towers are mixed use, with ground floor retail.
|
| The city is definitely quite different from the early
| 2000s, though.
| cloudedcordial wrote:
| I was in the area around 2010 working for someone else. Adding
| to your bullet points:
|
| - The pool business near the single-digit RIM buildings had
| more business than they could do. Many folks wanted swimming
| pools at their homes.
|
| - Various eateries such as the sandwich shop mentioned in the
| article made decent money during the height of Blackberry.
|
| - People skipped starter homes and bought single houses as
| their first homes. Some real estate agents waited outside of
| some buildings during bonus was announced.
| marssaxman wrote:
| > People skipped starter homes and bought single houses as
| their first homes.
|
| This is a terminological distinction I am not familiar with;
| what is a "single house", and what is the difference between
| a starter home and a first home?
| creaturemachine wrote:
| Maybe they consider a townhome or apartment condo as a
| starter home, which is true in the current market, but 25
| years ago it wasn't uncommon to buy a detached as your
| first home.
| tempest_ wrote:
| They mean a single family home which might be described as
| a "detached house"
|
| In the GTHA (including Waterloo) there is no such thing as
| a starter home any more, which in the past meant "small
| detached house, probably needs some work". The only thing
| they build now is very small 500 sqft condos and very large
| 3000+ sqft houses.
| kspacewalk2 wrote:
| >-Waterloo has seen serious decline since the death of RIM
|
| >-Not sure it will ever come back, most people including myself
| left years ago.
|
| I think you overestimate Waterloo's decline just a tad, perhaps
| your perception being coloured by leaving it. I assure you,
| it's thriving and in many ways better than the early 2000s when
| I went to UW. Including the condo boom you mention, though I'm
| puzzled why you think this somehow hurts walkability.
|
| But yes, Lester street is unrecognizable and every single house
| I lived in between 2002 and 2007 is gone.
| wizee wrote:
| Agreed 100%. Waterloo has grown substantially over the last
| 15 years, and is generally thriving. The condo boom and
| general increase in density has only increased walkability.
| Most of these condos have ground level retail too. The light
| rail is also a nice addition.
|
| As RIM/Blackberry declined, a whole ecosystem of startups
| emerged started or staffed by ex-RIM folks. The universities
| have also grown substantially.
| dmuth wrote:
| Your _username_ is nice nostalgia for me. :-)
| StrictDabbler wrote:
| I'm glad to see WCRI is still there, though it's hard to claim
| it's fully "off-campus".
| lproven wrote:
| The world needs a driving licence for email. It would mandatorily
| include use of plain-text and bottom-posting.
| beng-nl wrote:
| I used to think the same but I caved when I started using web
| interface email clients. Let's face it, the world has moved on,
| new generations are online, and we are the wrong ones now.
| speerer wrote:
| I don't understand why this isn't configurable. Why can't the
| basic data structures (of one email after another in serial)
| be displayed in either order depending on mail client
| settings?
|
| Admittedly I haven't looked into it because I'm perfectly
| fine with top posted emails. But I routinely sort files in my
| directory. Why not emails in a displayed thread?
| bregma wrote:
| It's people quoting text, not threads of messages.
|
| The ability to semantically parse text to determine what
| order paragraphs should be displayed in to suit the tastes
| of the individual reader is a very recent development. Or,
| rather, will be soon. Maybe not very soon.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| Quoting the prior message(s) should be off by default.
| When paper letters were still written, did you enclose a
| copy of the original letter when you answered it? No. And
| nobody looks at the growing trail of the entire message
| thread that's copied below your reply. Just leave the
| subject line intact and anyone that doesn't have a brain-
| dead email client will see the messages threaded
| properly.
|
| If you need to address a specific point in a message
| you're replying to, quote just that bit.
|
| We are emailing TBs of data around daily that provides no
| value to anyone.
| GJim wrote:
| > When paper letters were still written, did you enclose
| a copy of the original letter when you answered it?
|
| The point of bottom posting was you never left the
| original text intact, but trimmed it to show the relevant
| details you are replying to and so enhance readability.
| Exactly as I am doing now in this reply.
|
| > If you need to address a specific point in a message
| you're replying to, quote just that bit.
|
| Precisely. Just like this. We are on the same page!
| thworp wrote:
| As the other comment mentioned, the email body contains the
| entire quote chain. The way clients accomplish threaded
| display is a combination of:
|
| - parsing the unstructured email body and looking for quote
| levels, html formatting and printed email heads
|
| - parsing certain headers like message-id, in-reply-to,
| dkim sig
|
| - looking for sections of the message body in the inbox
|
| This is done because there is nothing in the protocol to
| cleanly accomplish what you want. Even if there was, you
| could not rely on it at all. Doing anything with email is a
| gigantic PITA, you sometimes get emails where the msg-
| encoding header doesnt match the body's encoding, html in
| the plaintext section and other fun things.
|
| Since nobody really cares about the RFC and just does their
| own thing, there is no chance at improvement.
| lproven wrote:
| This is true. OTOH, I do think the problem is solvable.
|
| I came up with a routine to parse and translate about
| 2-3GB of saved emails into MBox format once.
|
| The official delimiter is unbelievable, IMHO.
|
| << the exact character sequence of "From", followed by a
| single Space character (0x20), an email address of some
| kind, another Space character, a timestamp sequence of
| some kind, and an end-of-line marker. >>
|
| https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc4155
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mbox
|
| That's it. An email is a section of text beginning with
|
| From $something
|
| That's the spec.
| immibis wrote:
| Certain software used to add a > before any line starting
| with From in an email body because of this.
| lproven wrote:
| > I caved when I started using web interface email clients
|
| It's one of the things I like about Gmail. It does plain-text
| and bottom quoting just fine.
|
| > Let's face it, the world has moved on, new generations are
| online, and we are the wrong ones now.
|
| NEVER GIVE UP! NEVER SURRENDER!
|
| https://mygeekwisdom.com/2014/03/15/never-give-up-never-
| surr...
| immibis wrote:
| If the entire email is being replied to, I can just read that
| email, which is displayed immediately before the current one
| in a threaded display. Why should I have to scroll past
| another copy of that email?
|
| However, the original email is included as a convenience in
| case my MUA doesn't support threaded display or it's a
| mailing list I joined after the original email was sent or
| any other reason why I might not see it. That's why there is
| quoting at all.
|
| Nobody top-posts when using _selective_ quoting because
| obviously it 's different.
| csmattryder wrote:
| I'm teaching the chapter, "Why is everyone signing off with J?
| A crash course in email from Windows users"
| afandian wrote:
| Europe has one. I've got one. I am qualified to use 2004-era
| Microsoft software, and have a certificate to prove it...
| somewhere.
|
| (Edit: since I got mine it's acquired the word 'international'
| but lost the word 'driving'. Swings and roundabouts.)
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Computer_Drivi...
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| I hate both of those things. I guess this means war, please
| look for my envoy bearing the formal declaration of war.
| lproven wrote:
| You are wrong.
|
| https://useplaintext.email/
|
| The biggest and most successfull FOSS project of all time is
| coordinated entirely by email. These are the rules:
|
| https://subspace.kernel.org/etiquette.html
|
| Again: you are wrong.
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| I don't give a shit what the Linux kernel does. It doesn't
| change the fact that I think plain text is ugly, HTML mail
| has no drawbacks I care about, and bottom posting is just
| plain weird.
|
| > Again: you are wrong.
|
| No, you.
| xattt wrote:
| > bottom-posting
|
| Immediate and indefinite suspension of email license.
| GJim wrote:
| A: Because it messes up the order of things.
|
| Q: Why is top posting bad?
| gknoy wrote:
| You jest, but I've noticed that the conventions of "newest
| on top" vs "newest on bottom" is _seriously confusing_ for
| some people that I help navigate tech stuff. I don't know
| how to describe the heuristic for:
|
| - New text conversations show at the _top_ of the list of
| conversations - New messages are at the _bottome_ of a
| conversation - New emails are at the _top_ of your email
| client (?) - and now you remind me that email replies can
| be both at top and bottom (:
|
| It feels arbitrary, but I suspect this is due to the
| heritage of paper, where newer things are on top of the
| pile, but in a given document, newer text tends to be added
| at the bottom/end. (it's a stretch :))
| GJim wrote:
| No.
|
| Bottom posting replies was the default in all early email
| and USENET clients.....
|
| Then MS Outlook came along, which was the first email
| client to break convention and default to top posting
| (i.e. putting the cursor at the top when replying to a
| message). Thence forth, "office" users began top posting,
| and the confusion began.
|
| To this day, the old guard (like me) bottom posts and
| _always trims the above quoted text of irrelevant
| details_ (!). Anything else was considered not only lazy
| and sloppy, but the mark of a noob with bad netiquette.
| p_l wrote:
| A significant part of weirdness involving
| outlook/exchange is that _it is not an SMTP-based email
| client_
|
| Even though X.400 is no longer officially feature of
| Exchange, the entire data model of MAPI is based on it,
| shared between Outlook and Exchange, with somewhat lossy
| translation when it has to go outside of X.400-over-RPC
| that MAPI provides.
|
| Sometimes you can get burned by vestigial parts of the
| model, like how MS MAPI implementation as provided by
| Outlook/Exchange (there used to be others!) does not
| actually support HTML email, and crashes with corrupted
| message errors if given an email object containing a HTML
| body.
|
| Now I can hear you going "but Outlook does HTML email!".
|
| Outlook converts HTML email body part into _RTF-wrapped
| HTML_ and stores the resulting message in RTF body field
| of message object. In fact, before Outlook got changed to
| convert RTF to HTML, Outlook users were infamous for
| sending RTF formatted emails (at least RTF was always
| documented, as it was supposed to be interchange format).
|
| But MAPI messages do also contain a HTML message body
| field... But if you put HTML there, MAPI.DLL explodes -
| or at least did every time I did it.
| cloudedcordial wrote:
| A local technical college has a dedicated course on "Slack at
| workplace" (or a paraphrase of the title).
| sixstringtheory wrote:
| Hopefully they're discouraging students from sending lots of
| fragmentary messages interspersed with superfluous nonsense
| like "hey" "i mean" etc
| easton wrote:
| That random "J" at the end of the messages brings me back to mail
| circa 2010. As I recall, iOS also didn't render Outlook's smileys
| right, leaving a bunch of Js in mail from my Mom.
|
| (For the ones who 'missed' it:
| https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20060523-10/?p=31...)
| nehal3m wrote:
| !!!1one
| jareklupinski wrote:
| for a long time, I thought people were just really into giving
| me a single letter nickname
| jihadjihad wrote:
| same here J
| SoftTalker wrote:
| Lots of email clients still don't.
| arjvik wrote:
| Poor Sumit B. He never did anything - it was his manager!
| teddyh wrote:
| The story of Bedlam3:
| <https://rodneymbliss.com/2013/10/17/i-survived-bedlam3/>
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| > it's estimated that over 15 million emails were generated in
| the space of about an hour.
|
| wtaf?
| ano-ther wrote:
| This happens often enough (even MS itself broke their internal
| Exchange servers).
|
| And every story seems to end with admins having to improvise. Am
| curious: (why) isn't there a "kill reply-all chain" button as a
| feature?
|
| (The article explains that this didn't work for RIM because of
| BB's architecture, but for Exchange?)
| wiredfool wrote:
| The search term for MS for is bedlam 3.
| RandallBrown wrote:
| I worked at MS in 2012 and we had another email storm that
| shut down almost everything. I remember not being able to do
| any work at all because the network was so slow I couldn't
| even edit files (the internal source control system required
| getting a lock on the file to be able to edit them).
| philipwhiuk wrote:
| The standard fix is to massively limit who can send emails to
| DLs - which is an Exchange config option.
| eddieroger wrote:
| In theory, mail should be stateless, so what would they use to
| do that? Some clients and servers understand headers for thread
| identifiers, and then it would be possible to (in theory) zap
| that id, but all it takes is one client not supporting it for
| that to be out the window. The article kind of points this out
| - Exchange had a mitigation, but the clients got the
| notification and were able to reply because by then the mail
| was on the client (pushed).
| minkeymaniac wrote:
| Some more of these: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Email_storm
| dmalik wrote:
| Haha I was working there at the time. I don't remember how many
| emails came in but well over 100.
|
| Emails were so abused there though. I would get over 100 a day
| that were work related. Think Slack over email.
| philipwhiuk wrote:
| Yeah, I'm pretty sure this isn't the only time it happened - I
| don't recall Sumit but I do recall others.
|
| I worked in the NOC and you quickly learned to basically ignore
| every non-personal email sent before you were on shift that you
| weren't directly copied on. If it wasn't your shift and it
| wasn't handed over, it wasn't important.
| dmalik wrote:
| Ya this definitely happened a few times.
| hnthrowaway0328 wrote:
| A few years ago we got the same thing: a guy sent a email to
| finance showing his bonuses and somehow sent it to everyone. Then
| everyone knows his bonus and salary.
| tgsovlerkhgsel wrote:
| I don't know why these articles (and many comments here) always
| make it sound as if the people replying were idiots. For many, or
| I'd rather say most in this case, it's clear that they know
| _exactly_ what they 're doing - having some fun given the
| opportunity that presented itself.
| cruffle_duffle wrote:
| Reply all storms are some of the most amusing things to witness
| and joke about with your colleagues. Sadly I haven't seen a
| good one in a very long time :-(
| tbojanin wrote:
| this is one of the funniest tech stories ive heard!
| chamanbuga wrote:
| I vividly remember this incident and more like it. I was coached
| by my manager to never reply all to an email addressed to a
| larger distribution group because of this exact reason. Not only
| were you annoying people, but everyone's email ended up getting
| delayed for an hour or two.
|
| Can someone explain to me why the backlog would happen? Why they
| didn't have systems to protect from such a basic DOS attack?
| canucker2016 wrote:
| from the first Exchange Reply-All email storm, a dev who worked
| on the Exchange server,
| https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/blog/exchange/me-
| too/610...: An Exchange email message
| actually has TWO recipient lists - there's the recipient list
| that the user sees in the To: line on their email message. This
| is called the P2 recipient list. This is the recipient list
| that the user typed in. There's also a SECOND recipient list,
| called the P1 recipient list that contains the list of ACTUAL
| recipients of the message. The P1 recipient list is totally
| hidden from the user, it's used by the MTA to route email
| messages to the correct destination server.
| Internally, the P1 list is kept as the original recipient list,
| plus all of the users on the destination servers. As a result,
| the P1 list is significantly larger than the P2 list.
| For the sake of argument, let's assume that 10% of the
| recipients on each message (130) are on each server. So each
| message had 100 recipients in the P1 header, plus the original
| DL. Assuming 100 bytes per recipient email address, this bloats
| each email message by 13K. And this assumes that there are 0
| bytes in the message - just the headers involve 13K.
| So those 15,000,000 email messages collectively consumed
| 195,000,000,000 bytes of bandwidth. Yes, 195 gigabytes of
| bandwidth bouncing around between the email servers.
| ... So what did we do to fix it? Well, the
| first thing that we did was to fix the MTA. And we tried to
| scrub the MTA's message queues. This helped a lot, but there
| were still millions of copies of this message floating around
| the system. To prevent anything like this
| happening in the future, we added a message recipient limit to
| Exchange - the server now has the ability to enforce a site-
| wide limit on the number of recipients in a single email
| message, which neatly prevents this from being a problem in the
| future.
|
| It didn't fix the problem completely from what I recall, there
| were smaller versions of Bedlam at MSFT. I've heard that some
| branch of the US Dept. of Defense created their own Bedlam
| storm a few years back. So they had to layer in a few more
| guardrails to prevent another reply-all from getting out of
| control.
|
| Here's one reference, https://www.theregister.com/2023/02/14/us
| _army_reply_all_sto..., though I thought they had one back in
| the 2010s.
| canucker2016 wrote:
| Another storm hit MSFT around the start of the pandemic, http
| s://forums.theregister.com/forum/all/2020/03/26/microsof...
| canucker2016 wrote:
| Maybe the last fix for the reply-all email storm problem
| (at least for Exchange servers)?
|
| see https://www.theverge.com/2020/5/10/21253627/microsoft-
| reply-...
| setheron wrote:
| Every company has lore like this; I remember when I joined Amazon
| hearing how someone would create SEV-1 tickets because their
| phone didn't work (Jeff B. would get personally paged for all
| SEV-1 at the time)
| Lammy wrote:
| > Blackberry at the time was kind of an "everything goes,
| whatever it takes" free for all. And this damn the torpedoes full
| steam ahead attitude was pervasive everywhere.
|
| > RIM Job
|
| I love that this was actually the URL for their careers page in
| this era:
| https://web.archive.org/web/20101122175558/http://rim.jobs/
| tverbeure wrote:
| I _love_ reply all events and have fond memories of the
| adventures of the Fluke Meter at GlobeSpan (long defunct.)
|
| It started when one good soul sent out a worldwide email asking
| "Who has the Fluke meter?" and after the first person replied
| "It's not here!", the rest of the world reacted in kind.
|
| It took about a day for the storm to die down.
| shepting wrote:
| I was working there that fall as one of my co-op work terms!
|
| I recall the onboarding tour around the testing rooms which were
| essentially giant Faraday cages. There was a print-out on the
| door exhorting employees to CLOSE THE DOOR! when you come or go.
| Apparently it was a semi-monthly occurrence where someone would
| accidentally leave the door propped open and the nightly tests on
| upcoming devices would make real 911 calls to the local
| dispatchers as the E2E tests on physical hardware were running.
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(page generated 2024-11-19 23:00 UTC)