The Missouri Dept of Labor shows they are Technical Idiots

Yesterday the Missouri Department of Labor sent me a 9 page long form I had to fill out, just to make sure the company I earned a whopping $850 from in 2010 does not need to pay unemployment tax. I started filling it out when I noticed it said I could e-mail the form to them instead. Great, that sounds easier! So I went to the site and found the PDF form that I then downloaded, filled-in and saved as a PDF file on my hard drive. They also needed any 1099 forms I may have from the company, and since I received one from 2010 I scanned that to a PDF along with the front page of their form that I had signed. So I thought I was done and could send off the form and go on with more exciting things on a Saturday morning. Wrong! The message bounced since the Missouri MODES-4389 PDF at 300K and my scanned PDF at 4.1MB together were too large for their mail server. Fine, I thought I would rescan my 1099 and my signature in black and white and at 300 dpi instead of 600 dpi and then send it off. So I did and found my PDF shrink down to a lovely, smaller 560K. Both files together were now under 1MB combined. So I sent off this message and what do you think happened? That's right my message with 1MB in attachments bounced as being "too large". 

Okay, if The Missouri Department of Labor tells you that one of the options of sending this useless form to them is by using e-mail, they should have an e-mail server that will accept an attachment that is 1MB in size!! I know I get upset when people in my department in the university send 40MB attachments to 50 people within our own building, but 1MB attachments are fine by me. When we upgraded to our latest Ubuntu Linux mail server, I bumped up the maximum message size from the default 10MB (in Postfix) to 64MB as we had set on the previous sendmail server. I would think the IT folk at the State of Missouri would be smart enough to realize that if they expect anyone to e-mail in these forms they also must increase the maximum message size of their stupid Exchange server.

Comments

James C said…
Hugh, Always enjoy your site tools and your completely worthless blog! I wonder how we do, as well as we do, collectively as a nation--there are a lot of boneheads in business and all sectors. Regards, James C
12:46 AM
Mo Department of Labor said…
Please contact us so that we may figure out how the error occurred. Our limit is 20MB, not 1 MB. You can reach us at amy.susan@labor.mo.gov. Thank you.
4:43 PM
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