[Previous entry: "CompUSA: Automating customer service out of eCommerce?"] [Main Index] [Next entry: "iGain by iGnoring my policies..."]

11/14/2002 Archived Entry: "Return to Sender: How to lose customer trust"

Any businessman knows: if a customer tried to send your company a letter, and it came back stamped "Return to Sender," it would ruin your reputation. So why do companies allow this to happen with their e-mail? Your "Internet presence" is more than a web site. Read on to find out about the amateur mistake that makes companies look bad.

"We need a web site," says the CEO. Someone is hired to put up the web site. Perhaps it's someone who isn't an Internet "expert," but knows how to design things. Perhaps management just doesn't want to fund a "full scale" Internet system.

I see it happen all too often. A company goes online but forgets to follow the rules regarding e-mail.

No one "runs" the Internet; it's a model of cooperative anarchy. Still, the cooperation requires rules, and on the Internet, those rules are called RFCs, or Requests for Comment. The RFCs define the standards that let the Internet work. There's an RFC that defines how e-mail is transmitted from one server to another. There's an RFC that defines how web servers work.

There's also an RFC that defines certain e-mail addresses that should always work. This is RFC 2142, "Mailbox Names for Common Services, Roles, and Functions."

There's one address in particular that should work without fail: "postmaster." The RFC that defines e-mail requires that any Internet address accepting email must accept mail to "postmaster." This mail should go to a human who is responsible for operation of the e-mail system. If you're trying to send e-mail to a domain, and you don't know exactly who should receive it, "postmaster" should always work.

A lot of companies don't seem to have a "postmaster" address. Some have one, but it goes to an automated system, not a human.

When you don't accept e-mail for an address at your company, it gets "bounced" to the sender. They receive an electronic version of "Return To Sender - No Such Address." If the customer expects that the email should go through, then you've just created a huge trust issue for yourself. They now know that you don't know about (or don't care to follow) the rules of the Internet.

Of course, there's a worse sin: publishing an email address that doesn't work. If you put up an email address as a point of contact, it needs to work. This seems obvious. In my experience, it's not obvious, because companies get this one wrong all the time.

A case in point: I got some spam that seemed to have been sent due to a company I trusted misusing my email address. (This will undoubtedly become a weblog entry of its own in short order.) I sent a message to a few logical addresses: the postmaster of the companies involved, and contact addresses for the companies involved.

An e-mail to the contact address of the parent company in question (contact@800america.com) was returned with the message "Invalid recipient." Considering that this address was published as the official contact address on the company's web site, that pretty much demolishes any credibility the company may have had right there.

The real kicker, though, was the attempt to notify Greenfield Online. This is an online opinion poll company that contracted out with the apparent spammer to provide a "reward management" service. Greenfield didn't directly spam me, but they did assure me at the time I signed on that they carefully screened and limited their affiliates.

I verified their privacy policy on their web site. The policy indicated that privacy questions should go to "privacy@greenfieldonline.com." The first warning sign was that this address wasn't a clickable link.

The second warning sign: the mail bounced. "Failed." That's all the message said. Being an Internet sort of person, I was able to look up the numeric status code 5.1.1 (using RFC 1893) and determine that the failure was "Bad destination mailbox address"--in other words, the e-mail address doesn't exist.

Bad enough that the published address is bogus. Worse that the e-mail system doesn't return a useful error message, especially since most e-mail systems return useful messages by default.

Well, the logical thing to do is to forward the failed message to their postmaster, so that the broken email address can be fixed.

This is an automatically generated Delivery Status Notification.

Delivery to the following recipients failed.

postmaster@greenfieldonline.com

Final-Recipient: rfc822;postmaster@greenfieldonline.com
Action: failed
Status: 5.1.1

Okay, so how could this company make it worse?

Well, I sent an email about all of the above to the customer-service address of the company. Two days later, there's no response... not even an automated response.

This is a polling company. They routinely ask me for personal data, and assure me that it will be kept private, anonymized, and used for limited purposes. That requires trust. Greenfield Online cannot operate without the trust of its users.

So... what business case supports an e-mail system that is apparently designed to destroy any trust in the company's relationship with its users?

Please read our privacy policy before posting comments.