>-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.

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.

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.

Your username is nice nostalgia for me. :-)

Density has hurt walkability?

I'm glad to see WCRI is still there, though it's hard to claim it's fully "off-campus".

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.

for a long time, I thought people were just really into giving me a single letter nickname

Lots of email clients still don't.

same here J

!!!1one

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 :-(

Sumit B forever has a story to tell at dinner parties.

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).

The search term for MS for is bedlam 3.

The standard fix is to massively limit who can send emails to DLs - which is an Exchange config option.

> it’s estimated that over 15 million emails were generated in the space of about an hour.

wtaf?

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...

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.

I hate both of those things. I guess this means war, please look for my envoy bearing the formal declaration of war.

I'm teaching the chapter, "Why is everyone signing off with J? A crash course in email from Windows users"

> bottom-posting

Immediate and indefinite suspension of email license.

A local technical college has a dedicated course on "Slack at workplace" (or a paraphrase of the title).

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.

Not surprising though that the negative consequences of one extreme can lead to an overreaction in the opposite direction.

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.