Email etiquette

Posted in Comments, on 15 April 2009 - 9:36pm

I try to reply to email questions about my patterns as quickly as possible.  It has happened more than once that when I do, I get an automated response like this one:

I apologize for this automatic reply to your email.  To control spam, I now allow incoming messages only from senders I have approved beforehand.  If you would like to be added to my list of approved senders, please fill out the short request form (see link below). 

Well.  This is very annoying, and I am always tempted to just delete my response and leave it at that.  But (at least so far) I then imagine that if I do that, there will be someone out there who thinks that I am the inconsiderate one, never responding to the legitimate query of one of my customers.  So please, please, if you have one of these spam filters, remember to approve email from me before you ask me to respond to a question via email!

2 Comments

2 Comments on this post:

That is aggravating, isn't it. I don't reply to the registration requests because I've never seen a privacy policy link telling me what is done with that information. I suspect these registration sites are great harvesters of valid e-mail addresses to be sold later to advertisers and spammers. I know it's awfully selfish of me, but I'm personally not interested in signing up for spamming just to keep someone else spam-free.

Posted by Ruby Louise | 18 April 2009 - 7:38am

I couldn't agree more. I run the internet side of a book business and find it quite offensive that other people's idea of how to control spam is to send it to me - which is, in my opinion, what they are doing. From time to time I write to the actual site that creates the spam and complain to them. Mostly, however, I ignore the order. I figure the potential customer will figure out what the issue is and if they don't, frankly I'm happy to do without the sale...

Posted by cathychua | 28 April 2009 - 1:41am

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