In the name of all vendors

[BarbaraC Profile Private messageWebsite]

I'm sure each forum member has experienced a situation where you never received what you know darned well was sent to you, so if you don't get a response from a vendor within 24 hours, try again, making sure you have the address correct. All it takes is one tiny letter out of place, and if someone out there in the world happens to have that address, they'll receive the mail, not the person you meant it to go to. And don't count on this stranger doing anything other than deleting your mail.

The other thing that can cause problems is a spam filter, which doesn't have a clue about who is friend or foe. Check the spam folder. Add the vendors you buy from to the friends list. (Did you know that some of these filters trash anything that contains a question mark in the subject line?)

I've seen the consequences, and I'll bet the other vendors have too. If they haven't as yet, they will. You can count on it. The internet isn't perfect and neither is email, but I know for a fact that every last one of the vendors who are members here are honest to a fault.

Barbara

[cherub Profile Private messageWebsite]

You are so right, Barbara !
Thank you for posting this.

I've met with this issue a few times, and it is indeed a big problem.
The last time it happened, the desperate client contacted me through my YouTube channel, because he never received the seven or so emails that I sent him. I, on the other hand, was looking for him with a message on my site. I even tried to speak Spanish (??? ) just to explain to him about spam filters

Right now I have a different kind of problem: Somebody from Germany placed an order with a certain email address, and when I tried to send him the freebie to which he is entitled, my email bounced back. So, I don't even know if he received his order. This person hasn't contacted me yet, so, maybe he is reading these lines and will email me with his correct address.

[BarbaraC Profile Private messageWebsite]

Mona, I just knew I wasn't alone in this sort of problem. What prompted me to write about it was an unpleasant email I got this morning from a customer who thought I was ignoring him. The truth is that I received only initial emails from him, gave him the help he needed, and then never heard from him again. I don't know what happened to the mail he says he subsequently sent, but it sure didn't get to me. My feelings were hurt because he apparently now thinks I'm a horrible person.

Just a few days ago, a customer misspelled her email address at PayPal, and lucky for her, the download email that's automatically generated bounced. If it hadn't, I wouldn't have known instantly what had happened, and she might still be sitting there wondering when she'd receive what she'd paid for.

Here's something: I once sent email to my very own self and didn't receive it, and there were no typos or anything. That's how reliable email can be.

But oh, those spam filters are the bane of vendors.

Barbara

[tdew Profile Private message]

Everyone should keep a watch on the spam folder. I have found that for some reason, no matter what I do, email from myself to myself gets labled spam.

[cherub Profile Private messageWebsite]

Well, it's not always the spam filters that are the culprit.

In the case that I mentioned above, it turned out that the Spanish speaking customer defined his Yahoo mail account so that he was able to receive emails only from people included in his contact list. All the rest of his received emails were automatically considered spam - that's how Yahoo mail works.

So, in the case of web based email services, people should rely on the automatic spam filters (they are excellent), and allow all other emails to pass, even if the address is not in their contact list.

[rdurga Profile Private message]

If the email servers are down, emails will not be received. It happened to me a couple weeks back. I sent a few emails to my son-in-law. He never received them. Later on he sent me an email saying that his email server was down during that period I have sent emails to him. His email address is not the usual ...yahoo, hotmail, gmail....These servers do have lot of backups and usually donot break down.

ram

[BarbaraC Profile Private messageWebsite]

When my ISP has mail server problems (exceedingly rare), they err on the side of caution: I end up getting two of everything.

Barbara

[im42n8 Profile Private messageWebsite]

Fortunately I've had only a few problems in this area. I've had people contact me that they hadn't gotten the bundle they purchased. A couple of times it was a problem on my end and rectified quickly. Several others tho, it was a problem with the spam or junk mail filter either at their end on at their e-mail server. I've only had a couple of e-mail address problems but that turned out to be typos.

Anyway, what I've done is to put a disclaimer on the webpage to check the junk mail folders if their e-mail with the download links haven't been received in a reasonable amount of time.

I've been fortunate, I think, in that I've only had a few curt e-mails but nothing in the venue of being irate. I'll keep my fingers crossed.

Dale

[BarbaraC Profile Private messageWebsite]

Dale, that's something I really have to do: warn customers about their spam filters.

Question: Are spam filters any better than a person's own eyes? The reason I ask is because I've never used such a filter and have always assumed it simply tosses everything into a junk folder that doesn't have an address marked as acceptable. Doesn't this then require the user to go through the "unknowns" the same as I do in my regular Inbox?

Barbara

[im42n8 Profile Private messageWebsite]

For me, the way I look at it, I'm saved a bit of work by the spam filters. Now, all suspicious e-mail goes to one location separate from my ordinary in-box. I can then scan through all the suspicious mail and remove the errant non-suspicious stuff. I consider it less work overall then filtering through my inbox mail. In the spam/jumk box, the material that's not junk/spam sticks out more. I can then bulk delete. Between the filters I create and the items identified as junk, my workload to manually filter out and delete those e-mails I consider junk is reduced quite a bit. I keep adding filters too so that the incoming mail is redirected as I want . . . saving even more work (in the long run).

If the filters are cranked up too much (such as what one of Mona's customers did .. .. .. accept only e-mails from address already in his/her email client address book) then an awful lot of e-mails are going to get misplaced. I've got one customer who's return address is strictly text . . . written out (not "@" and no "."). Ostensibly to avoid spam from sending out an e-mail to someone who's computer has been hijacked!. I can, however, understand it. Heck over 90% of the e-mail I get is junk!

Dale

[BarbaraC Profile Private messageWebsite]

Okay, here's the surprising lowdown: I get no spam at all, not a single speck of it. (I should never have said this. )

Barbara

[im42n8 Profile Private messageWebsite]

I've used this one address for over 15 years now. It acquires attention over that time. No spam means you're very lucky, it's a relatively new address, or a quirk!

Dale

[BarbaraC Profile Private messageWebsite]

It's an old address, but for about a year I used a program called MailWasher with which you can generate bounces. For that year, all spam got bounced back at the spammer until I stopped getting all spam. If it starts up again, I'll just use MailWasher again.

Barbara