{"id":17697,"date":"2017-12-19T12:22:49","date_gmt":"2017-12-19T17:22:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/philip.greenspun.com\/blog\/?p=17697"},"modified":"2017-12-19T12:22:49","modified_gmt":"2017-12-19T17:22:49","slug":"publishing-an-email-address-for-customers-is-bad-business-practice-in-the-spam-era","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/philip.greenspun.com\/blog\/2017\/12\/19\/publishing-an-email-address-for-customers-is-bad-business-practice-in-the-spam-era\/","title":{"rendered":"Publishing an email address for customers is bad business practice in the spam era?"},"content":{"rendered":"

The other day I emailed a fixed-based operator<\/a> (FBO) to inquire about a fuel stop. I didn’t get an answer and we ended up going to their competitor, thus denying them a return on what is probably at least a $5 million investment in the hangar, lounge, fuel trucks, etc. It is a pretty bad business practice to ignore customers so I dug a little deeper and found out that my email had been caught by a spam filter. I asked if they were going to publish this address at all, why not set the spam filter to “low”? Their response:<\/p>\n

We had to raise the spam filter due to the countless emails that came through and looked like they were legitimate only find out the hard way through a network virus they were not. It’s unbelievable the effort people put in trying to scam you. We would receive emails that look as if they came from our headquarters, but in fact were spam.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The regular phone system has already been made useless due to spam (see\u00a0Set a minimum price for phone calls?<\/a>) and now maybe we can declare straight-up email as also useless for this kind of public-facing role? Those “contact forms” on sites are kind of annoying, but maybe that is a good answer? (but they usually get sent to someone’s email, right?) What about publishing a Whatsapp address or similar?<\/p>\n

Related:<\/p>\n