E-mail Responses Blocked by Spam Eliminators
Do any of you have any good methods or ideas for dealing with this situation?
A big part of my job is responding to e-mail inquiries. Occasionally, I get an auto-response telling me to jump through three hoops to prove I’m a real person so that my e-mail can be delivered appropriately. Today, I received more than 350 e-mails, most of which accumulated over the weekend and at least 2/3 of which were spam. One response came back to me so that I could follow a link to ensure its proper delivery. A combination of factors, including how the old e-mail client reads certain characters and where it breaks lines, caused the link to fail. I am certain the same problem will happen again if I respond again to the e-mail. (I cannot use another e-mail client to access this account. I cannot follow links in the e-mail client, so I copy and paste them into a browser.) I don’t know if the inquirer has any way to look at the e-mails queued in this system to see that I have indeed responded.
This exchange is completely over e-mail. I have no further contact information for the inquirer or even have a clue where s/he might be writing from.
I feel odd about it because, as a professional, I should do whatever I can to make sure s/he gets some kind of response. But I also think I’ve reached the limits of the technology and can do no more.
I fear the future implications of this trend. Today, this is one e-mail in about three hundred. What if fifty e-mails ask me to do this hoop twirling for them? Do I have time to deal with that? Is it legitimate for my office to formulate a policy against going through the special motions to get to someone’s locked down e-mail account? Is it the inquirer’s responsibility to make sure s/he can receive responses to e-mails s/he sends? Is this the future of e-mail communication?
I occasionally receive complaints from people claiming they didn’t receive a response to an e-mail. I wonder how many of those are because of spam-filter issues.
October 19th, 2004 at 10:09 am
There’s no reason to bend around backwards to accomodate these people. I find these sorts of email filters *extremely* obnoxious and usually just give up. But it breaks my heart — sometimes I’ve just put quite a bit of thought into my response and now I have to prove I’m not a robot? What’s especially irritating is when people contact me first, and then have this idiotic filter. In those cases, I usually go through the motions, but add a section to the top of the email lambasting them for wasting my time.
If I had to answer lots of inquiries from the public, I would make it my policy to never follow through on one of these jackass filters. Email is a part of human interaction, and it’s simply inconsiderate to make your partner in conversation jump through hoops.
October 19th, 2004 at 10:53 am
Well, it depends how much you think that your job involves a service and how much it is just a courtesy. This is not a conversation you are having with someone [in which case I agree with Shimon] it’s fulfilling your job responsibilities. If you can’t follow links in the email account that you use for your job, and its impacting your ability to interact with clients, then you need to decide to either say “to heck with people and their hurdles” or *use another email account* somehow. Email is one of the most flexible net-tools out there. Unless your job is specifically restricting you [and if they are, ask them what to do about this problem] you have a ton of realistic options
- forward work mail so you can use a GUI email client
- bounce the email to another account you have with a GUI email client
- figure out why you can’t copy and paste the link and fix it
- send the client another email from a different account explaining the problem
- get your work to allow or enable access to email via a different method. there is no technological reason they can’t do this, though there may be policy reasons
Basically at the end of the day you have to figure out if you want to deal with this. If it’s happened more than once or twice, then in my opinion, especially if you are using outdated software, it’s your responsibility to find a way to serve these people, even if they’re dorks, and even if they have stupid spam solutions. If your inbox is filling with spam you might want to try dealing with that at the same time so that you can solve two problems at one time.
October 19th, 2004 at 1:33 pm
I almost finished drafting a nice response to a number of Jessamyn’s concerns and my browser crashed. Let me try to reconstruct what I wrote.
I was intentionally vague in my post because I’m not comfortable discussing all of the details of the situation in a public forum like this blog.
From what the people who run the server have told me, the way the server is locked down, I have to use a certain kind of client for this e-mail account. I cannot download the e-mail to a desktop client, like the one I use for some of the other accounts. There are other reasons why it needs to be separate, too.
The older e-mail client has some features I haven’t found in newer clients that saves me a lot of time when I respond to the e-mail.
My employer uses a spam labeling program and blocks e-mail from certain domains. I find that the software they use to label spam is faulty: legitimate messages are often marked as spam and spam e-mail is frequently unlabeled. I tend to look at most of the e-mail because there have been situations where I would have missed a critical message had I deleted something marked as spam.
About 99% of the time, I can either follow or copy and paste links successfully from this e-mail client. It’s only when it converts some of the special characters to other combinations that causes problems.
The courtesy/service consideration has me thinking, though.
Seems like there was something else I typed in the original response …