Lotus Protector – Good technology still needs “athinking” (1/13/2010)

Another tale in the life of a Lotus Protector admin.

The system is humming along in the background and rarely needs looking at. In my idle moments (I have none right now) I look at statistics etc., but other than that … nothing. Until this last weekend. I was getting used to the fact that I now have less mail, or so I thought. It was still after the new year, things are less busy, even the spammers are still waking up from their new years party comas and send out less garbage.

Last week I was briefly in touch with a buddy of mine, and we loosely agreed to get together on the weekend and we were moving the conversation to e-mail. Then over the weekend he fell silent .. no response to some of my mails. Well, he gets busy now and then and has not responded at other occasions so it did not alarm me. Too bad, we wanted to grab lunch and watch the movie “The book of Eli”.

Turns out he did answer … but Lotus Protector tagged it as spam. Specifically I had it set up to tag the subject line with the [SPAM] and guess what … I had an older mail rule that I had not looked at for a while that kicked in … yeah – my buddy has been sent directly into the Junk Mail folder in my mail file. I found his mails (he frantically answered 3 times) and allot of other mails I had been missing in there.

So, what does this highlight? That systems will do what you tell them. Good systems will do EXACLTLY what you tell them and it is up to you to act accordingly. So this acts as a cautionary tale to check settings and review things. Especially when you notice “lite mail volume” – something is up! You have to check where all that stuff went to.

I just want to mention once more – this is not a Protector issue, it is a stupid admin issue. Imagine this in an environment with a few thousand users …. I would be running around the clock right now to check people’s mail files for mail rules AND changing the rules on Protector to change that [SPAM] prefix to something else.

Image may be NSFW.
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Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.