I got more fun spam today, and though I had sworn off spam-related Email Fails for a little while, I couldn’t resist. Because this one highlights an issue that I find really annoying in legitimate emails as well.

It’s the multi person/multi-address Email Fail.

In this particular instance, the email is from acmeorders@gmail.com. And the name associated with that email address is, let’s say  Roger Smith. The Reply-to address is a FranklinRobbins@hushmail.com. So that’s two different domains, two different people’s names. So far.

Now we move to the body of the email, where the reader is instructed to  ”contact me at my other email address, Ralph@yetanotherdomain.com.”

And finally, the email is signed by Hilary Somethingorother.

Four people’s names, three addresses.

One irritated email recipient.

It’s super annoying to get emails from addresses you’re not supposed to reply to. Or emails with multiple addresses. Or emails that have the address they want you to reply to in the body of the message, instead of just sending their email from that address. Or emails that have so many different people’s name associated with them.

Who’s sending the message? What address should I reply to? Make it easy for me, people, this is ridiculous!

Just for kicks I sent an email to all three email addresses. Immediately after sending, I got the bounce message that the Reply-to address was full.

Perfect.

I’ll update if I get any results from the other two email addresses. But don’t hold your breath.

Update: I got a reply from a totally different Gmail address (YummyFrank, very professional), signed by Sasha, From Luz. Addressed to somebody else, and telling me to respond to Lisa@. I love these guys.

If you rely on email to communicate with your customers, there are a lot of ways to lose their trust and, consequently, their business. Fill their inbox with “special offers.” Sell their email address. Etc.

But maybe the best way to lose a customer’s business is to accidentally stop going after it.

In February, Expedia did just that. From the Email Marketing Lounge:

Expedia sent an email to assumingly a select group of affected subscribers on Friday, February 13th letting them know that their email address had been inadvertently unsubscribed. The unsubscription happened due to a one-time “technical issue” that occurred between November 8 and December 5. Expedia has since re-subscribed those users back to a ‘subscribed’ state.

If their promotional emails were working, just think about how much business they lost in two to three months. (And why does a month-long “one-time” issue just not sound right to me?)

The email to the recently re-subscribed included a prominently placed unsubscribe link, giving everyone a great big easy out. Again. As if just doing it for them the first time wasn’t enough…

I think it’s great that just about every company has an info@ email address these days. You can just send an email to some generic box and sit back, knowing (hoping?) to hear back soon with a reply.

The only thing I like less than not getting a reply at all is the reply telling me that somebody will actually reply soon. Or getting an email back with a phone number to call.

Some recent examples that I’ve found annoying:

Your request information has been sent to us. We will be contacting you within 48 hours.
Thanks for telling me my request has been sent to you. I wasn’t sure that happened when I hit “send.” I think this one just needs a complete rewrite. If I was going to send out the same canned message to everyone who emailed me, I’d spend more than 20 seconds writing it. But that’s just me…

This message is to acknowledge that we have received your email. One of our members will be contacting you in the next 24 hours. We are Insanely Busy!!
This auto reply came from a company that provides administrative assistance to executives. If you’re telling me you’re too busy to reply to my email, why would I want to hire you to take care of MY administrative tasks?

Thank you for your inquiry. Your message has been received and will be directed to the appropriate staff member who will respond to you within 3 business days. We appreciate your interest in Our Company, Inc.
The thanks are nice and all, but really? Three days to get back to me?

Thank you for contacting The XYZ Company. We will respond to your request within 24hrs. Feel free to call us at 1-xxx-xxx-xxxx for faster service. Or log on to www.XYZ.com.
Why put an email address out there if you’re going to just tell people to call you for actual service?

In all of these cases, I imagine an office with one computer. Somebody’s nephew convinced them they needed a website and an email address to stay current. So they got the nephew’s buddy to design a website for them, got the email address up there to seem like they are reachable, and tried to forget all about it.

And now they’re stuck, having to reply to those pesky emails.

With more and more users relying on Google for, well, everything, Tuesday’s big Gmail outage was a nightmare. Google wasn’t very forthcoming with details, though they did blog (in part) the following:

2/24/2009 04:28:00 AM

If you’ve tried to access your Gmail account today, you are probably aware by now that we’re having some problems. Shortly after 10 9:30am GMT our monitoring systems alerted us that Gmail consumer and businesses accounts worldwide could not get access to their email.

We’re working very hard to solve the problem and we’re really sorry for the inconvenience.

It’s kind of a wake up call. We’ve all come to rely on our email to be there, every moment of every day so we never miss anything. Whether it’s another corny joke forwarded from Granny or important correspondence from a colleague, we all kind of freak out when we can’t get our email.

What would happen if it lasted a day? Or two?

If Google is susceptible to this kind of outage, who isn’t?

Scary…