Slow day at the office

Sometimes, human error still trumps technology. On 28 February, UCT students and staffers were up in arms as the campus was hit with yet another leaden email delivery day. At one stage more than 500 000 messages were standing in a line.

The cause, it turned out, was one email account that continually sent out a single email message. Some sleuthing later and Information & Communication Technology Services traced the source of the message to a student account. They stopped all email from that account.

The message was also removed from the queue to prevent any further delay in mail delivery.