An unfortunate word

[vin_petrol]

I see the World Rally Championships have started again. Years ago I wrote some code to process the results PA send to us and put them on the Orange WAP site. The data source I use for this is not designed for automated processing, so it sometimes goes wrong. We accept this risk, on a cost-benefits analysis: better to do this cheaply and have automated results that rarely go wrong, rather than pay an expensive human to get it right all the time.

To help me spot if it's gone wrong it emails the processed results set to myself and the support staff here, and it's been doing this happily for years. We can just glance at the email and tell if it's gone horribly wrong, and fix it if it does.

Last year we moved to a new, more corporate desktop PC and email system. Hold that thought...

Suddenly, one race weekend late last year, I stopped getting the Rally emails. "Oh no", thinks I, "my code is broken is utterly broken and failing without sending out any kind of error message or warning. What is wrong with it?" So I carefully single step the latest results file using the debugger, and realise that it did indeed work fine. It's just that the email didn't actually reach me. So I send myself a quick test email. That shows up fine, and anyway other systems are emailing me without problem. I copy and paste the results set into an email and it does NOT arrive. Eek! What on Earth in a set of Rally results can stop it being received as an email? So I look very carefully at the results set...

And then I see it. I can't receive emails concerning the World Rally Championships because there's a driver taking part in this competition called Federico Villagra! His surname trips the spam filter here and the emails are discarded. This is him:

http://www.wrc.com/jsp/index.jsp?lnk=501&featureid=1210&desc=Federico%20Villagra

It took several weeks journey through a typically byzantine corporate helpdesk system to get his name whitelisted so that I can receive emails that mention that name.

I wonder if he has email problems himself? Do you think he has an account and wonders why no one ever emails him?

Comments

[nigelmouse.livejournal.com]

I remember you mentioning that before, you've finally got it sorted now ?

I was half expecting you to say that after all those weeks stuck in helpdesk hell that this time round he wasn't driving :)

[vin_petrol]

It took a while, and had a few odd moments ("provide business justification as to why you should receive emails containing this word") but it got there in the end.

So, yeh, I'm kinda glad he's driving this season too!

[wibblefish.livejournal.com]

had a similar issue which came to light when our previous owners complained no one was going to webcasts etc. The issue was traced to the presence on the mailing list of one Tina A. Dyke.