I, Spammer

Averaged over the year, our Assignment Calculator web app sends about 500 email messages a month. I know this off the top of my head because thanks to some file system maintenance last Friday, the Assignment Calculator's email function is working properly for the first time in almost 14 months. Which means that in the wee hours of Saturday morning, the Assignment Calculator sent the approximately seven thousand messages that had been queuing up.

Seven.

Thousand.

Oops.

We messed up. If you are one of the people we first let down by failing to send promised notifications and then annoyed by flooding you with useless email, I hope you'll accept my apology on behalf of the Libraries.

Sadly, our only recourse to apologize directly to the over 700 users we spammed with much-delayed notifications is to email them again, which we did promptly once we realized what had happened.

We're asking ourselves some hard questions raised by this incident. Namely:

1. Why were we unaware that these messages were not being delivered? (The standard convention of piping cron errors to /dev/null is the immediate answer.)
2. How can we ensure that we're notified in future if this or similar jobs fail?
3. What is the future of this application, considering:
• We've likely broken faith fairly spectacularly with anyone who tried to use the app over the past year, and
• Despite being broken for over a year, we got no such reports from users.

We'll be discussing these issues internally in the Web Development department and with the Web Presence Management Group. If you have questions or concerns, please feel free to comment here or get in touch directly.