Who, Me? Have you remembered it’s 2025 yet? The Register asks the question because it’s often the small things that make for the kind of big problems that we share each week in “Who, Me?”, the column that celebrates readers’ escapes from their errors.
This week, meet a reader we’ll Regomise as “Henry” who told us of his early career adventures working for a managed services provider that provided a spam filtering service for its clients.
“Customers would point their MX records to us, and the product we used filtered for nasties and then sent legit emails to right inboxes,” Heny explained.
There was just one problem: the product that Henry’s company used to run the service had a terrible user interface that relied on some decidedly odd syntax that he wasn’t entirely across.
“Creating new rules was painful and required one to pay specific attention to the logic used, namely AND/OR operators,” Henry told Who, Me?
When Henry was asked to implement a new filter rule, he therefore resolved to concentrate fiercely.
“The rule was supposed to block messages from one email address at a single domain from ever reaching the client,” Henry told Who, Me?
The requirement was therefore to filter any message from the hypothetical address makeitstop@bad.com and make sure it never reached an inbox at henrysclient.com.
Which seemed simple enough.
But that finnicky UI and syntax meant the rule Henry wrote looked for messages sent from makeitstop@bad.com OR sent to any inbox at henrysclient.com.
“Yes, I effectively told the spam filter to drop any email sent to my client,” Henry confessed, describing this as a “major blunder”.
That assessment may have been a little harsh, as it was only the next day the client reported zero incoming emails and thought to ask if there was a problem.
Henry was reprimanded for his mistake, then given the job of reviewing the spam filter’s logs to compile a list of everyone who emailed the client during the time his rotten rule was in force.
But he also felt a little vindicated because his employer changed its processes after the incident, so that any new rules in the spam filter could only be implemented after signoff by two people – one of them a senior tech.
Have you caused a fault by flubbing syntax? IF you click here to send Who, Me? your story THEN we can consider it for a future column. ®
