Sun Messaging Server uses SendMail to deliver emails

It is very important to discuss with your customers the reasons behind their requests. Let's be frank... Sometimes, they really have no idea what they want.

I have a customer who, until today, thinks that Sun Messaging Server utilizes the SendMail daemon on the Solaris OS to deliver emails.

How did I found out? Well, he called me 2 days ago: "We need to perform maintenance this weekend. We do not want our internal applications to deliver emails via our Sun Messaging Server during this period of time. So, can I just disable the SendMail daemon for the time being?"

I almost jumped off my chair. I do not feel sad for him. I feel sad for his employer. I feel that workers these days do not really spend their time reading up. They are just clocking hours. They have stopped asking "Why" which I used to do.

So, these days, I will usually ask the rationale behind any request. On times which I forgotten to ask, I found out I usually wasted a lot of time researching for them only to realize it does not fit their actual operational requirement.

Lesson learnt: Ask for business requirement first.

• With the business requirement, try to resolve it with the technology available in their environment.
• Do not start the discussion purely from technical point of view.