From Houghton-Mifflin MIS regarding the ongoing self-mailbombing

Fri Dec 13 13:23:00 PST 1996

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A lesson in stupidity.

- -rich

[Forwards from impeccable intermediate sources snipped; if you REALLY need
to confirm, mail me.]

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OK. I used to work in the MIS department of Houghton Mifflin, and still am
good friends with the upper MIS people. In fact I had dinner with them
last night.

Although the promotion is/was real, PLEASE DON'T SEND THEM ANY MORE
EMAIL. The mail gateway is throttling with the incoming mail - we had
a long talk last night over how to aleviate this problem. They've gotten
alittle over 100k messages in 1 week. The mail server is currently a SPARC 5
w/ 64MB RAM and a gigabyte of swap, and is so hosed that they're switching in
an Ultra2 tonight to try to handle the load.

The lesson here is: don't do a marketing ploy without first consulting
your Tech people. Apparently, the whole thing was cooked up by one of the
departments, who neglected to tell MIS.

Also, for those of you who might possibly work in industry in the
future and are looking for a way to gather email addresses or do some kind of
promotion like this, USE WEB HITS. The average email coming in to HMCo is 
about 4kb, requires disk space, and requires a vfork() of sendmail to deliver. A
typical Http hit runs less than 100bytes, is served by a threaded httpd
server, and requires very little disk access.

Anyway, this is just a note to please spare my friends at HMCo. The kids are
going to get all the donations promised, and my friends have enough headaches.

Thanks!