May
28thFunny But True : The emails that don’t exist
To start off, let me preface this by saying two things: 1. This is funny because of the predicament and not the players. In no way am I implying that anyone is incompetent. 2. I have changed the names and story slightly to protect the innocent. So I am having a normal day; the standard eight hours of meetings mixed well with eight more hours of managing the team and writing design/implementation plans, when into my cube walks Alex. Alex is a business analyst who is working on a new customer process. This new process takes our existing platform and allows customers to avoid needing an email address or internet access to interact. Alex tells me that they had just purchased a new domain name and need to know the next steps for setting up an email domain and server to handle emails (using corporate email cluster is NOT an option). Turns out the existing platform requires email as a primary key. Which means that even though the customer doesn’t need one, the database/process does. So the solution Alex brings me is to setup an email server and every time an account is created they will create an email for the customer on this new domain. Then they use the existing email notification components (of which there are many) without change. He asks me to setup an email server to receive these emails and immediately delete them upon arrival (since they are useless). So I ask the most logical question: [...]
