Living Without Reliable Email Today, Like Our Ancestors the Cavemen

From the Stanford IT site:

4:10 PM: University IT engineers continue to monitor updates from Microsoft. They reported initial progress but have acknowledged setback in the deployment of their remediation. Mail to M365 accounts continues to fail at this time.

1:27 PM: Users continue to experience delays sending and receiving email due to a widespread Microsoft 365 (M365) outage. University IT teams are actively monitoring the issue. Updates are provided on uit.stanford.edu as information becomes available. Thank you for your continued patience.

12:55 PM: Users may experience delays sending and receiving email due to a widespread Microsoft 365 (M365) outage impacting several M365 services. University IT teams are actively investigating the issue and will share updates as more information becomes available.

The problem seems to cover "thousands of Microsoft customers," not just Stanford.

Comments

[darkknight9]

Only real bummer about keeping the ol college email account. If its only one or two days a year, its outshined by the discounts at certain online retailers. 🙂

[tkamenick]

Sadly, I graduated college during the brief phase when colleges gave students email addresses, but didn't let them keep them after graduating.

[Life of Brian]

Remember the good old days, when if your email server went down it was 1) usually because of something you did, and 2) for that reason, usually within your control to fix?

The single points of failure, where large swaths of enterprises get nuked by the poor choices of invisible and generally unaccountable sysadmins with no direct accountability to those enterprises, continue to multiply.

[John F. Carr]

In those days email might have to wait for a telephone connection to be made, sometimes only during off peak billing periods, for each hop in the path from here to there.

In addition to waiting for email, the cavemen also had to pay for phone calls outside of the local calling area. And to make calls from a public place. "And for a dime I can talk to God, dial-a-prayer. Are you there? Do you care? Are you there?" - Janis Ian

[Incunabulum]

This is why you always have a couple blankets, a gallon of water, and a jar of nuts in the office;)

[Longtobefree]

Remember when you bought programs, not rented them?

[Bruce Hayden]

The thing is that email is an old technology. Easy to deal with email. I use Thunderbird on my PC, and have far less trouble with it, because you can get to the parameters, that products like Outlook and Apple’s IOS Mail try to hide. I still can’t get IEEE.ORG email to work with IOS Mail. It now uses Google’s GMail to sign on, but through their own interface. IOS Mail can’t figure it out.

In any case, products like Outlook 365 try to hide the interface, and do other unnecessary stuff. And they keep evolving the product, when they don’t need to.

[Bruce Hayden]

I really hate Office 365. Well, Office in general. I have a license for a 20 year old version with unlimited seats. Works for everything I want, and I used VBasic to do a lot of other stuff. So, of course, MSFT added a bunch of useless feature, and changed the internal configuration of internal files. Charged to upgrade, more than it used to cost new. Then, they switched to a rental model, charging even more a year, with Office 365, than it used to cost to buy it.with really no useful new features.

[Bruce Hayden]

The reason that email should be idiot proof to deal with is that is standardized. There are well established standards - two for input messages (POP3, IMAP), one for transmitting it, one for receiving it (SMTP), and one for its contents.

AOL tried to tie their proprietary internal email format to their services, and maybe was part of why they failed. You could only send, say, pictures between users by standing on your head. It was hard attaching files without a lot of extra work, Which was hard for the computer naive - who were eventually their primary customers. Drove me crazy as an IP atty dealing with them, and trying to get drawings, etc from AOL users. Patent clients weren’t the issue. But some TM and CR clients were, esp the artistic ones. AOL tried for a Network Effects monopoly, tying them into AOL, But didn’t have the market power to succeed.

[jPendleton]

Microsoft is notorious for failed email deliveries. It's like my colleague Eileen used to say: "Your first problem is that you don't know what you're doing. Then you broke it, so that was pretty dumb."

When you get it working again, you'll be right back in a North Korea style digital prison brought to you by CIA-front company Palantir Technologies. I haven't been able to communicate with anyone for years -- lucky I'm a resourceful guy and managed to flee the country.