I whole heartedly second the opinion that an option to turn that feature off for certain groups, especially Public, should be added to the system.
Otherwise, I just looked into this issue recently due to spamming every contact in Remedy twice in a week - had to delete over 100K e-mails. The translation happens internally as part of the Notify action in a Filter (or Active Link). That is, you have a Notify action that sends to zero, and the system translates that to everyone and stars creating the messages in the AR System Email Messages form. You won't see a message in the AR System Email Messages form that goes to 0. In my case, I decided the easiest place to stop things, that would catch any OOB ITSM notifications going to 0, was on the NTE:Notifier form. A record gets created in there for every e-mail that goes out. I added validation filters that attempt to ensure that the e-mail address is at least remotely valid (like it contains an @ and it isn't at the beginning or end of the "address", etc.). If the e-mail address is not valid, I simply clear it, and the system then doesn't even try to send a message. Lyle From: Action Request System discussion list(ARSList) [mailto:arslist@ARSLIST.ORG] On Behalf Of Logan, Kelly Sent: Thursday, June 09, 2011 12:58 PM To: arslist@ARSLIST.ORG Subject: Re: WARNING OF BAD AS DESIGNED FEATURE IN ITSM - zero in internet email field for person is not good. ** I agree that group translation is useful and I can even see where it could be useful to have a contact record that would have a group ID instead of an email address, but the price of making a mistake is disturbingly high. I think it wouldn't hurt to have the option to prevent emails to "Public" (and perhaps some of the other common groups like "General Access"), in the same way that you can configure ARS to disallow unqualified searches. It's an option that almost everyone would want to have active while still allowing a unique customer to turn it off. I'm guessing that, as usual, we'll have to do it first so Remedy can use it in the next patch. . . ;^) So does anyone know where the translation taking place off-hand? Is it a central location or a common action in several modules? Kelly Logan, Sr. Systems Administrator (Remedy), GMS ProQuest | 789 E. Eisenhower Parkway, P.O. Box 1346 | Ann Arbor MI 48106-1346 USA | 734.997.4777 kelly.lo...@proquest.com<mailto:kelly.lo...@proquest.com> www.proquest.com ProQuest...Start here. 2010 InformationWeek 500 Top Innovator P Please consider the environment before printing this email. This email and any files transmitted with it are confidential and intended solely for the use of the individual or entity to whom they are addressed. If you have received this email in error please notify the sender, and delete the message from your computer. From: Action Request System discussion list(ARSList) [mailto:arslist@ARSLIST.ORG] On Behalf Of JD Hood Sent: Wednesday, June 08, 2011 5:42 PM To: arslist@ARSLIST.ORG Subject: Re: WARNING OF BAD AS DESIGNED FEATURE IN ITSM - zero in internet email field for person is not good. ** Well, you specifically told the email system to notify the group "Public" (group ID = 0) -and- there are sound reasons and a reasonable need for the ability to notify by group ID. Unfortunately, you found out the hard way what "0" resolves to... You aren't alone as this is not the first time this has happened and likely won't be the last. I'll presume you've already got a filter in place to error if email address = "0". Don't feel too bad. It's not like you ran "rm -r *" without realizing you were from root while logged in as root on a unix box or something. (There's a story somewhere in there...) I don't mean to make light of your episode, but hopefully, you will look back on this and get a chuckle. So, keep your chin up. You have a nice bragging scar from this lesson. JDHood On Wed, Jun 8, 2011 at 6:49 AM, Andrew C Goodall <ago...@jcpenney.com<mailto:ago...@jcpenney.com>> wrote: ** All, FYI - for ITSM users We had an issue last week in which a service desk associate created a proposed people record for a vendor and entered a zero as the persons email address. Upon creating the incident with the new person as the customer the BMC workflow treated "zero" in the email field as meaning I need to email EVERYBODY that has a people record!!!! For use that is over 300,000 records! Needless to say our executives were not very happy about this, we had opened a CRITCAL issue with BMC on this because it was not as simple as deleting all the relevant records from "AR System Email Messages" form since the NTE functionality was shipping 100 records or so every few minutes to be processed by the email engine in "AR System Email Messages". We needed to STOP the messages from getting processed by NTE, but BMC support did not have a remedy (HA - pardon the pun), they said we just had to let them process - RIDICULUOUS! Furthermore we found out through this issue that this is an "AS DESIGNED" feature - RIDICULULOUS! So be warned if you don't want your service desk to accidently email everyone in the company add an active link to validate the value in the email field when creating a people record. It is breath taking to me why BMC would think this is a good "AS DESIGNED" feature. I can understand needing that capability for use in workflow - but for goodness sake only allow it on a back end hidden field e.g. a z_ field, and NOT a forward facing field editable by users. 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