Today I received this email

To: steve_portigal@sbcglobal.net
From: steve_portigal@sbcglobal.net
Subject: Disk Usage Warning (critical)
Date: Sat, 19 Mar 2005 05:51:58 -0800

The account with the username ‘stevep’, is running out of disk space.
Please remove some files from this account, or ask the administrator to increase your disk quota.
You have currently used 90.85% of your disk space.

Talk about useless! It’s autogenerated from myself, to myself. It doesn’t make any reference to what organization, site, company, or anything, except for stevep – you can imagine that I’ve got many accounts using the name stevep. I eventually ran an nslookup on the IP address in the header (yeah, that’s what I did and for most people what I just wrote is complete nonsense) to see that it came from my ISP. But I have two domains registered with that ISP! They don’t tell me which one, they expect me to map the login to the domain? Even their support person couldn’t tell me what domain this account name referred to; he suggested I tell him all my domains and then he could tell me which one this was? I happen only to have two, but what if I had 30? Or 300? I’m sure that’s not unusual.

Very very crappy error messages, and of course, the usual technical-oriented support that doesn’t feel this is really a problem they need to address.