Re: [bitfolk] How to handle unresponsive customers with issu…

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Author: Andy Smith
Date:  
To: users
Subject: Re: [bitfolk] How to handle unresponsive customers with issues that cannot be ignored

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gpg: aka "Andy Smith (Linux User Groups UK) <andy@lug.org.uk>" [unknown]
gpg: aka "Andy Smith (Cernio Technology Cooperative) <andy.smith@cernio.com>" [unknown]
Hi Scott,

On Sun, Dec 18, 2016 at 11:57:58PM -0500, C. Scott Ananian wrote:
> On Fri Dec 16 Andy filed a RT ticket with me about spam being sent from my
> account. Unfortunately, he quoted the problematic spam in the RT ticket,
> which means that his email to me included the spam verbatim, which of
> course meant that it ended up in my spam folder as well and I never saw it.


Yes, apologies again for that rather rookie mistake. I really should
have realised that a message with spam in it might not get through.

> He then turned off networking for my domain. Which certainly got my
> attention.


If the only issue were "getting the customer's attention" then I
would normally be happy to wait a lot longer - at least 21 days as
we've established now. In this case though I was seeing spam being
delivered so I had to shut off the network, and would have done that
whether we'd been in conversation or not.

> But that's neither here nor there. What my story seems (to me) to indicate
> is that "we did not receive the email" is in fact a valid excuse if the
> email in question quotes spam.


Me quoting spam was certainly a bad idea and I will avoid doing that
for at least the initial message in future.

When I say not receiving the email is not a valid excuse though,
it's specifically because I've now implemented multiple contact
methods one of which being phone. I will certainly make use of a
cell phone number to send a text message, before shutting anyone's
service off.

I will also add more contact methods if they seem popular and
relevant. Perhaps Twitter? I may not be able to direct message
people but can at least leave a "@yourname please contact us
urgently" message.

> Content-specific filters make that a bad assumption.


It also highlights the fact that the concept of a "spam folder" can
be problematic is an outright delivery rejection would be more
useful to me than a delivery which may just go to a folder that's
never read. I know this is not always under people's control. But
the battle for email is lost and email deliverability is only going
to get worse.

Cheers,
Andy

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