Open Letter to Rev: Quality Is Job #1

[Bill Marriott]

Jacque,

> If you have spam filters in place, please whitelist "runrev.com" and be 
> sure to send your question from an account with a working email address 
> which you check regularly.

There was a period from 2/9/2006 to 5/13/2006 in which I received absolutely 
NO email from Rev... including the use-rev list, support requests, trial key 
requests, marketing materials, everything. (Luckily I had the gmane 
newsgroup interface for the list.)

The messages were NOT being caught in my ISP's or email client's spam 
filter. It was some other problem. I tried writing RunRev about the issue 
but never got a definitive response (to my "backup" MSN email). I assume the 
problem was eventually caught by Rev, because it started working again.

If your customer sent their requests during that time frame, he was likely 
also affected by the issue.

> This happens over and over again. Either the customer doesn't trust us to 
> keep their email address private (which we always do) so they invent a new 
> one they forget to check, or else they have filters set up that interpret 
> the ticketing system's email as spam.

I use a custom address for every external site that I use. It's not just 
because of trust issues. It makes it very easy to sort everything addressed 
to "runrev(at)wjm.org" into the appropriate folder. If you think of it, 
runrev sends stuff from several different addresses, and I would never be 
able to anticipate in advance what that address might be. It also very 
useful when a company has asked whether it can "share your address" with 
"partners who provide valuable discounts." You can easily see when that has 
happened, and who shared the address.

But on the pure-spam issue it does help even with reputable companies. 
Apparently a virus harvested my email address from a well-known disk 
defragmentation company. (I truly doubt they would intentionally spam me for 
penny-stocks and replica watches.) It was a simple matter to "kill" that 
email address with a filter and register a new address with that company. If 
I used the same address for everything, I would never have been able ti 
identify and solve the problem.