"- Your engineer said to me "we took down 600 old accounts and are reviewing our contact policies going forward" and "there are still plenty of other customers who are listed generically as bouncing so we will have work to do here"."
(snip)
"That tells me that you knew that you were sending to old accounts and that your bounce handling was either not great or non-existent."
Yes, that is exactly right.
I have instructed everyone to be as liberal and forgiving of non-payment and failed contact as possible. These people, who were paying customers, have data stored here for safekeeping and we're not going to trash it because we haven't heard from them in 3 months or their email bounced.
I can give you hours of stories of customers who came back from military deployment, came back from depression, came back from prison, came back from financial ruin ... that contacted us, beyond all hope, to see if we still had their account. And we did.
After 21 years of doing this are there a few hundred accounts that we are giving extreme benefit of the doubt to ? There certainly are.
Bottom line: our duty of safeguarding customer data trumps this weeks fashionable spam heuristics.
> Bottom line: our duty of safeguarding customer data trumps this weeks fashionable spam heuristics.
I haven't suggested that you do anything differently to that.
Keep the data, keep the accounts, do whatever you feel is best for you and your business.
All I've said is to be smarter when it comes to sending email to old accounts that are repeatedly bouncing. I've outlined what was wrong and I worked with your engineers to resolve it.
The screenshot I got of your conversation with (Dave) was, indeed very well done and was both informative and actionable. You responded to us very quickly and with a high level of professionalism.
Further, participating here in this HN discussion is noteworthy and impressive.
FWIW, we immediately complained to he.net about the bad actor elsewhere in that /24 ... we'll see.
> The screenshot I got of your conversation with (Dave) was, indeed very well done and was both informative and actionable. You responded to us very quickly and with a high level of professionalism.
> Further, participating here in this HN discussion is noteworthy and impressive.
Thank you - much appreciated.
The quality, morals and perception of our product and how we treat people matters to me greatly which is why I'm always happy to get involved in discussions like this.
As is evidenced from other post on this topic, there are a number of competitors that don't behave in the same way and that leads people to think we are all the same and I absolutely want to challenge that perception when it comes to us.
> FWIW, we immediately complained to he.net about the bad actor elsewhere in that /24 ... we'll see.
Thanks, feel free to refer them to me and I'm happy to provide as much evidence as they need.
(snip)
"That tells me that you knew that you were sending to old accounts and that your bounce handling was either not great or non-existent."
Yes, that is exactly right.
I have instructed everyone to be as liberal and forgiving of non-payment and failed contact as possible. These people, who were paying customers, have data stored here for safekeeping and we're not going to trash it because we haven't heard from them in 3 months or their email bounced.
I can give you hours of stories of customers who came back from military deployment, came back from depression, came back from prison, came back from financial ruin ... that contacted us, beyond all hope, to see if we still had their account. And we did.
After 21 years of doing this are there a few hundred accounts that we are giving extreme benefit of the doubt to ? There certainly are.
Bottom line: our duty of safeguarding customer data trumps this weeks fashionable spam heuristics.