Thursday, July 06, 2006
That's not my problem
Today, DramaticLady called wanting to speak to a supervisor. No problem--that's me! She was upset and "not laughing anymore" because "I've lost the trust of my daughter!" Apparently, DramaticLady's daughter had emailed her, and then they'd gotten into an argument because DramaticLady didn't believe her that she'd sent the mail, and now they're not speaking, and so DramaticLady thinks she should get a refund.
Right. We're going to refund your money because you had a misunderstanding with a family matter, let it blow up, and are now upset about it. That would be a sound business decision.
She complained that she's had a few friends try to email her and they get the emails returned to them. OK, that happens sometimes, we just need to know what that returned email says to know why it's happening. "It says I'm not here!" OK... that's not really specific enough, maybe if you could have one of those people forward the error message to us? "It says I'm not here! Look into it!"
So it seems that there are two problems here. One is not related to our service, and one might be. If you send out an email and it gets returned to you, a lot of things might have gone wrong. I've seen situations where email gets returned by an antivirus scanning proxy, it gets returned from your outgoing server due to an authentication failure, or it gets returned by the recipient's incoming server due to account problems, network problems, an incorrect or invalid email address, a full mailbox... There are a few places that type of error could originate from. Most seem to be caused by people typing in an email address incorrectly or if the recipient's mailbox is full, but not always.
In short, we just need to know what that message says, and unfortunately if DramaticLady is offering up her own succinct paraphrase, it might not contain the information we need. We normally ask people to have the person who received the bounce message forward it to us, and then it's really easy to address.
But that wasn't good enough for DramaticLady. "You are a young guy and you don't have children overseas and if you did you'd react very differently!"
"Ma'am, I don't think it's fair for you to speculate on my personal life and bring that into the discussion. If you're having trouble with your email, then let's stick to that, let's get that error message, and let's fix the problem."
"No! This is ridiculous! I want you to FIX IT! LOOK INTO IT!"
"Ma'am, I need that error message to look into it. When I have that error message, I will tell you why it's coming up and what needs to be done to correct it."
"Forget it! I want my money back and cancel everything RIGHT NOW!!"
"Ma'am, I can cancel your service if you like, but understand that there is no refund on the account."
"No amount of money will repair my relationship with my daughter!"
Good... then it won't be a problem when we can't give you a refund.
Right. We're going to refund your money because you had a misunderstanding with a family matter, let it blow up, and are now upset about it. That would be a sound business decision.
She complained that she's had a few friends try to email her and they get the emails returned to them. OK, that happens sometimes, we just need to know what that returned email says to know why it's happening. "It says I'm not here!" OK... that's not really specific enough, maybe if you could have one of those people forward the error message to us? "It says I'm not here! Look into it!"
So it seems that there are two problems here. One is not related to our service, and one might be. If you send out an email and it gets returned to you, a lot of things might have gone wrong. I've seen situations where email gets returned by an antivirus scanning proxy, it gets returned from your outgoing server due to an authentication failure, or it gets returned by the recipient's incoming server due to account problems, network problems, an incorrect or invalid email address, a full mailbox... There are a few places that type of error could originate from. Most seem to be caused by people typing in an email address incorrectly or if the recipient's mailbox is full, but not always.
In short, we just need to know what that message says, and unfortunately if DramaticLady is offering up her own succinct paraphrase, it might not contain the information we need. We normally ask people to have the person who received the bounce message forward it to us, and then it's really easy to address.
But that wasn't good enough for DramaticLady. "You are a young guy and you don't have children overseas and if you did you'd react very differently!"
"Ma'am, I don't think it's fair for you to speculate on my personal life and bring that into the discussion. If you're having trouble with your email, then let's stick to that, let's get that error message, and let's fix the problem."
"No! This is ridiculous! I want you to FIX IT! LOOK INTO IT!"
"Ma'am, I need that error message to look into it. When I have that error message, I will tell you why it's coming up and what needs to be done to correct it."
"Forget it! I want my money back and cancel everything RIGHT NOW!!"
"Ma'am, I can cancel your service if you like, but understand that there is no refund on the account."
"No amount of money will repair my relationship with my daughter!"
Good... then it won't be a problem when we can't give you a refund.
# posted by Terry @ 11:17 AM 
