For some time now, I’ve been trying to keep a small (but growing) list of things that just should be so amazingly embarrassing to geeks that they rise up and unilaterally fix them so as to be able to sleep at night; guilt free.
These are the really really simple things that should bug technical professionals.
Consider un-subscribing to an email mailing list. Some just say, hit the reply button, type remove in the subject line and you are outta here. Others give you a link, you head there and you are outta there.
So, it seems to me that a site which, after you say take me off your mailing list, would have a set of technical people extremely embarrassed when a web page pops up saying it will take up to 7 days to remove your email address from the system.
Meet James Sherman, Founder of Sherman’s Travel. James has a nice site with lots of “unbiased” reviews on stuff, good travel deals, etc. James, yet another Harvard MBA/Bain Consultant type, has a mailing list that comes out weekly with some decent deals in it. I signed up for it, read it for a bit, and liked it.
In pruning down the mailing lists, James and his crew got the axe. I’m in Canada, not all that helpful, see ya later, bye. After clicking to un-subscribe and doing so, I get this screen:
This should just embarrass technical people everywhere. Every geek who works for James should just refuse to touch a keyboard until this is fixed. I’m not going to go into the english parsing of the arrogance this “realize for unsubscribe…” dribble has me thinking about. No that’s just Bain/Harvard/East Coast speak for “thank you for allowing us to serve you.” James and his travel site are not alone. This is just one of many I’ve come across. Although James gets additional points off for the 7 days because most of these embarrassing sites usually give me 3 – 5 business days as the limit. Bad, all around.
Next up, the out of office (OOF) message.
I’m on a couple of mailing lists and every now -n– again, somebody’s out of office message spams everybody. This is embarrassing from several perspectives.
First, how hard it is to just OOF once per in bound address. This means that if I send you ten emails, I only see the OOF as a reply to the first message. Simple, yet some systems are too stupid/lazy/whatever to fix this
Second, mailing lists.Again, it is not hard to simply tell the email client only send an OOF once and only to email addresses not mailing lists. Yes, you are going to probably flip me email about how tough it is to figure out which is what. It’s not impossible and simple V1.0 steps like only sending OOF messages to people in my contacts would be a good start. The point: this annoyance could be fixed.
This is a case where lots and lots of email systems are POP/SMTP or Web/Host based. Lots (tons) of open source, free love everywhere, but nobody, it appears, is embarrassed enough to fix this.
A particularly smart guy named Leo Notenboom, once did a podcast on why he thought Out Of Office messages were evil. Leo’s points about telling the world you are out of the country so please rob me as well as validating your email address with spammers are both good points. But, the evil part is the geek squad not fixing this.
Naturally, there are 100s if not 1000s of places where some technical thing is broken, has been broken for years and continues to remain broken. It should be embarrassing and that embarrassment should lead to stuff just getting fixed.
I know, dream on
Embarrassment isn't what gets things fixed--money gets things fixed. There is probably very little value to the author of email systems to get out-of-office messages right. When you have to prioritize all of the features in a system, some things have to be at the bottom of the list.
I know that I would much rather have Microsoft's engineers working on better IMAP support in Outlook than on the out-of-office message feature in Exchange.
Posted by: Jason | October 31, 2005 at 09:42
Embarassment might cure Sherman's Website, but embarassment can't do much about the SMTP protocol infrastructure. Many smart people have wasted countless hours figuring out how to deal with recalcitrant mail programs. Things like VERP-ed addressing, various X- headers, and reply timeouts have all been an attempt to limit the damage of OOF replies to mailing lists, all of which can be defeated by someone writing a procmail script that sends it's auto-response to the From: address instead of the Reply-To: or Return-Path: address.
Much of the spam issue could have been neutered at the protocol level, rather than at the (vastly more expensive) implementation level, yet the SMTP protocol won't be replaced any time soon because the installed base is too large. Embarassment has nothing to do with it.
Posted by: Larry | October 31, 2005 at 15:52
Out-of-office messages have been a solved problem for years and years now. It's just that everyone seems keen on reinventing the wheel, and the overwhelming majority of wheel-reinventers turn out a square, proclaim "there's a hole in the middle where the axle goes through, so the project is now finished" and go home.
Come to think of it, the same is true for mailing lists...although those solved the problems you refer to a bit more recently...my mailing lists still had the occasional unsubscribe issue until almost 8 years ago, for example.
Posted by: Matt | November 01, 2005 at 01:24