Nine thousand unread

The mistake

The contact form is wired to deliver submissions to a mailbox that was provisioned ad hoc and never added to the team's monitored channels, ticketing system, or alerting rules, so nothing notifies anyone when mail arrives there. The form's auto-reply promises a one-hour response SLA, but that promise isn't backed by any process — it fires on submission regardless of whether the destination inbox has an owner. Because "form submitted successfully" and "someone will actually read this" are treated as the same guarantee, messages accumulate for a year with no one aware the backlog exists.