Response to S. Diamond's posting

< Next Message | Back to archived message list | Previous Message >

Note: This message is from the outliners.com archive kindly provided by Dave Winer.

Outliners.com Message ID: 3361

Posted by arne
2005-06-01 21:50:05

Hi there,

I feel the need to respond to Stephen Diamond’s post wherein he blasted me for not responding to his email. First off, I DEFINITELY apologized to him at the outset for the delay in responding; here’s the opening line of the email:

“Please accept our apologies for the delay in responding to your support request. It is our policy to - where possible - respond to all support email requests within 24 hours. Unfortunately, your email was rejected by our SpamAssassin spam filtering software as per the following synopsis: “...

I then included the SpamAssassin synopsis for his email. I went on to say that the type of HTML attachment that he sent as his email is generally not safe to view; this is pretty standard practice for many companies. *Properly* formatted HTML email is not a problem.

As for saying we have “a duty to tell users BEFOREHAND…” all I can say is that there are MANY things in company policies that are often not explicitly stated if they are considered “generally accepted practice”. This is not necessarily ideal but it is the way of the world. Of course, since Mr. Diamond has made this an issue, we will update our written policies to say as much.

I note that Mr. Diamond is not overly given to give-and-take and is generally confrontational in his approaches. Rather than considering that we tried to act in a reasonable manner, and trying to mutually resolve the issue, he visciously and personally attached both myself and my partner Eric Sommer. We answered his support query within 24 hours of actually receiving the email as was our promise; I simply said that it was unfortunate that the email was sequestered by our spam filter but any reasonable person would not hold us responsible for that. There are MANY reasons why an email might not show up in an inbox within moments of being sent - anyone who’s used email for any length of time knows this.

At ADM, we pride ourselves on providing excellent support and many of our users praise us for our painstaking attention to detail and for going over and above in providing support. That said, there will always be cases where one misses the mark and as such we are constantly striving to improve our record.

Sincerely,

-Arne Hermann, CTO
Advanced Data Management

Back to archived message list