The Tale of a Thousand Emails.. and counting!

What a week!

On Wednesday, just before I left work I sent a Client Alert to 55 Clients/referrers detailing INHERITANCE TAX and transferability of the nil rate band allowance.

I was so pleased to have managed to:

• print the Alert as a presentable document for posting
• create a letter to go with the printed Alert
• add the Alert to the website
• bookmark the Alert
• inform staff of the Alert
• email all relevant Clients/referrers

and all within two hours. I was now ready to leave the office and relax until Thursday morning.

BUT, Li'l Monster took poorly overnight, Dramaqueen demanded the same attention and Hubby was working nights. I had very little sleep and L'il Monster was no better the next day.

So I called work to say I was taking a days holiday to look after L'il Monster.

Reception immediately informed me that they had been inundated with phone calls regarding the Client Alert. GREAT thought I, the information must have been of great interest to them.

Sadly this was not so, the contacts had received the email hundreds and thousands of times.

Not good. Now that work knew I was taking a holiday the matter was passed on.

What had I done? Nothing out of the ordinary - just sent the same email to a number of contacts.

Well, I returned to work on Monday with fingers crossed that everthing had been sorted, but no! 922 bounce back emails greeted me from one day alone.

Apparently this is what was happening... the email left Latimer Hinks, travelled to Demon then to despatch. Something seems to have happened between Demon and despatch.

The Clients are receiving the Alert but a message is bouncing back to me to say Undeliverable. The computer is then resending and resending.

On Monday 2 of the contacts had a system overload and their networks crashed.

No-one is admiiting liability. Our IT guys say Latimer Hinks have not caused the problem. Demon say we have a virus. Whilst those two providers are arguing it out the emails keep on coming.

Obviously I've had quite a few calls asking me to STOP sending the emails. On the whole the recipients of the thousands of emails have been very understanding - many thanks to them for their professional attitude.