Email Explosion

Screen shot 2010-01-06 at 7.49.23 PM.pngI finally got my Exchange account at work moved over to Exchange 2007. This means I can sync nicely with Apple Mail, iCal, and my iPhone. So, today I decided I would start forwarding my university address to Exchange instead of Gmail. I set the forward to go to Exchange and left work. At dinner I find almost 2,000 new messages waiting on my phone, and the number was growing quickly. I soon realized that I had, a long time ago, set a server-side rule in Exchange to redirect my Exchange mail to the university address. Once I changed my university forwarding from Gmail to Exchange, I ended up with an infinite loop:

  1. Email comes to netid@iastate.edu
  2. Email forwards to exchange server
  3. exchange server keeps message and redirects copy to netid@iastate.edu
  4. Repeat.

To fix this, I had to remote into my computer at work and fire up my Windows virtual machine so I could access the server-side rules in Outlook. Fun stuff.