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My automated email campaign cost a client $4,000 in false alarms
Last month I set up a threat alert sequence for a mid-size client in Austin. The idea was to send immediate notifications to their IT team when our scanner found something suspicious. But I didn't test the trigger conditions carefully enough. A routine patch update got flagged as a brute force attempt and the system fired off 47 emails in 90 minutes. Their security team thought they were under active attack. They called the CEO at home on a Saturday and hired an outside incident response firm for $4,000 before anyone realized it was a false positive. I spent the next week rebuilding the entire workflow with extra verification steps before any email goes out. Has anyone else had a marketing automation tool cause serious problems like this?
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harpery4720d ago
I mean, that story is kind of terrifying because it shows how fast these tools can spiral. We had something similar happen with a drip campaign that was supposed to send a single "we noticed you logged in from a new device" email, but a glitch in the trigger sent it every time someone refreshed a page. Turned into 200+ emails in an hour, and our whole support inbox was just people yelling about being spammed. It really makes you wonder how many of these tools are actually tested for worst-case scenarios instead of just best-case ones. Maybe it's just me but I feel like the default settings on most marketing automation platforms are way too aggressive for real world use.
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milacraig20d ago
200 emails isn't that bad, idk. People overreact.
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