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Mandolin Cafe

That company never responded to my email!

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"Boy, am I angry! I wrote Company X about their product awhile back and they NEVER REPLIED to me. I'm THROUGH with those jerks if they don't care enough about me to answer a simple question!"

It's not just time we dispensed with this kind of thinking, its been over for years. Email was *never* a 100% percent solution, a guarantee you contacted someone successfully. It never was, and never will be. So why do people continue to engage in this kind of finger pointing on the internet? As it turns out, I've been meaning to write about this for years and this morning the reminder why arrived on our own Forum.

Here's a test: spend one week looking at the headlines of ever piece of email in your Spam folder. Report back your findings here. Yes, we do it multiple times a day, and glad we do.

This could get long, but we'll try to keep it brief. Possible reasons why the email you sent 1) never arrived, or 2) was seen and never answered:

- Your IP Address Was Used for Spam
- You Used Spam Trigger Words

Source: 11 Reasons Why Your Emails Go in the Spam Box (and How to Make Sure They Don’t)

- You mistyped your own email address in the organizations's contact form. ie., you are the problem
- The reply you sought sat in your own Spam folder for X amount of days before it was automatically deleted.
- Spam filters are more aggressive than ever, resulting in too many legitimate emails diverted there.

Source: Mandolin Cafe, far too many years of seeing this kind of activity occur.

- "...how many people are actually going to take the time to sift through their spam folder to see if maybe, just maybe your email was inadvertently diverted there? My guess would be zero."
- You Have Incorrect Spelling and Grammar

Josh Pyorre writes in Cisco Umbrella about the surprising frequency of spelling and grammatical errors that occur in phishing emails. He says that this is often the result of non-native English speaking hackers using translating tools to convert their text into English. And they come out sounding strange, to say the least. So spam filters are on high alert, and spelling and grammatical errors could land your email in the spam folder.

Source: Here’s Why Emails Go to Spam (and What to Do About It)

- The email sent never even arrived at its destination.

Legitimate email can get blocked in error for a couple of reasons:

- The receiving system thinks your email looks too much like spam.
- The receiving system thinks you have a reputation for sending spam.

Because bouncing email flagged as spam would give the real spammers too much information about how to bypass the spam filters, it’s simply not done. Email flagged as spam is simply not delivered, or is delivered to the recipient’s spam folder, where they may or may not find it.

Source: Why Is My Mail to this Person Not Getting Through?

- You sent an inappropriate or rude message and the individual reading it made a decision to no reply to you. Yes, replying is an individual choice. We see rude replies sent often via the Classifieds. Our advice to users is they are under no obligation to respond to inappropriate or hostile contact.

In closing, a favorite stories that involved the Mandolin Cafe. Someone sent a link to a Reddit post where an individual was publicly railing about an important question sent to us about a mandolin (turns out, it was important) and never heard back from us. Was a proper public take-down and besmirch of our reputation. I copied the user's Reddit name and did a search of my email as the Cafe archives every single piece of mail. There it was, part of the user name but an unfamiliar domain name with too many possible combinations. It'd been mistyped and represented an unregistered address. I'd answered it but it had been returned as an invalid email address. The individual mistyped their own email address in our contact form, we couldn't reply to them. Their error becomes the reason for our public shaming. Welcome to the internet.

Better yet. Someone mistypes their email address in a Forum registration, the confirmation email bounces back, and then they use the contact form with the same bad address to contact us an ask--repeatedly sometimes, and angrily--why we aren't responding to them. Since both addresses are invalid, it's impossible. User runs off thinking we purposefully are ignoring them.

To be fair, I've engaged in this thought process myself. Once you catch yourself as the problem maybe you'll think twice about engaging in this kind of chatter on the internet. I'd like to think so, but I'm not holding out hope.

Number of valid emails found in the Mandolin Cafe's Spam folder today by 10:00 a.m. - 2.

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Updated Aug-28-2019 at 10:45am by Mandolin Cafe

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Comments

  1. BrianWilliam's Avatar
    Email has given spam a bad name
  2. David Lewis's Avatar
    Another forum I go to bans altogether besmirching businesses. Or at least naming them. I think it's probably ok to vent a bit - (I ordered a pick, and six weeks later it still hasn't arrived ... no names, no pack drill, just a vent. Hopefully, you get a bit of 'yeah, that's bad, hope it works out', but some people feel a bit better after venting). On another forum, a post went up stating that the poster hadn't had any response from a well-known local company. Turned out the respected owner was dying of cancer. You just never know.
    Updated Sep-01-2019 at 8:48am by David Lewis (redundancies.)