we're all gremlins here

on friday at work we encountered a single email with 2672 attachments

two thousand

six hundred

and seventy two

Today I learned the SMTP RFC specifically says that limiting the number of attachments (or their size) should be avoided. I don't know why I assumed it would have a maximum...

Why?!?!?

it looked to be a mistake wherein someone meant to overwrite the attachment by that name but ended up attaching another file with the same name

so that 2672-attachment message was being sent outbound, we decided to generate one with 10,000 attachments and inject it inbound and we watched their system parse it, and go "okay now it's time to upload all 10,000 attachments to AWS"

notably, this did not actually work, it got through 3595 of them before the job timed out : )

honestly that's pretty impressive, 3k before the timeout is solid imo

This is genuinely incredible. I've spent so much time doing email shit and I've never come even close to anything this cursed

yesterday we encountered a user account that managed to generate around half a million messages, to 4 addresses, none of which were deliverable! one of them was fuckin. normal world

Do you just work in email Hell?