Rim/Blackberry tales – reply all
awadwatt.com
awadwatt.com
-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.
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.
I want to say small world but after enough time it’s bound to happen, eh?
First floor mixed use retail can address this, but sometimes those spots sit vacant because of cost or other issues with rhe space.
My post was a bit too negative I suppose, some people probably like the tall buildings surrounding you when you’re walking, I mean it works for New York City right.
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.
- 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.
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?
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.
>-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.
As RIM/Blackberry declined, a whole ecosystem of startups emerged started or staffed by ex-RIM folks. The universities have also grown substantially.
(For the ones who ‘missed’ it: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20060523-10/?p=31...)
> 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/
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?)
wtaf?
If 1% of emails are blind replies from people out of the office, but are tracked by the originating sender (not the DL) since OOO messages in Exchange get sent to the DL (as well as the originating sender) and soon enough you have Exchange sending a new OOO email per reply from a new reply-er. Your typical company the size of Microsoft is going to have probably... 3-5k people out of the office at any one given time (the lingo is "OOF", or "out of facility")
OOOs can also trigger another OOO, which can in turn cause a new OOO to spawn.
Soon, you've got OOOs reply-all'ing to OOOs and drenching a DL... and an exchange forest.
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?
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.
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.
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!
- 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.
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.
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...
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.
(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...
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.
> Again: you are wrong.
No, you.
Immediate and indefinite suspension of email license.
Q: Why is top posting bad?
- 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 :))
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.
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.
In reality it's:
Q: Why is bottom posting bad?
Q: Why is bottom posting bad?
A: Because it repeats itself.
Q: Why is bottom posting bad?
A: Because it repeats itself.
Q: Isn't this also a problem with top posting?
Q: Why is bottom posting bad?
A: Because it repeats itself.
Q: Isn't this also a problem with top posting?
A: No, because the reader skips to the next message when they get to the quoted part.
Can someone explain to me why the backlog would happen? Why they didn't have systems to protect from such a basic DOS attack?
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.
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.
see https://www.theverge.com/2020/5/10/21253627/microsoft-reply-...
Ironic as RIM became known for its cripplingly dense beuaracracy and red tape.
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.
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.
Emails were so abused there though. I would get over 100 a day that were work related. Think Slack over email.
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.
I'm sure you can imagine the rest.