Plaxo hurts my business

[isafakir]

why does VIP service totally and completely ignore all my complaints

any hotel or any business I put in my address book gets blocked because it is a listserv. How the holy hanna does a hotel or the local Apple distributor become a listserv... That is just plain dumb and stupid and ignorant and at least a dozen customers of mine are just blocked period by this stupidity and VIP won't anwer a word. Typically you can't call anyone either.

Plaxo is a real time waster and I unfortunately can't use the language which they deserve at this point:mad:

[redgee]

Isafakir

Can you contact me personally so we can find out what went wrong with your support experience. I'd like to get to the bottom of this - it's very unusual that an open ticket is not resolved or at least communicated to within 24 hours. I wanted to get your email address, time sent, etc - can you shoot me an email at redgee at plaxo dot com.

Also, on our support site http://support.plaxo.com, you can search for "VIP number" and you would have seen this FAQ - it shows how VIP members can contact us 24 hours a day, 7 days a week:

http://kb.plaxo.com/article.asp?article=1323&p=4

As for the listserv - we do prevent sending update requests to emails that commonly "appear" as distribution lists. This is in FAQ:

http://kb.plaxo.com/article.asp?article=1268&p=4

Why does Plaxo do this? Simple - because many users and non-users complained. For example, a member sends an innocent update request to accounting@somewhere.com, thinking that her friend Jane Doe uses that email for work. What the Plaxo member doesn't realize is that "accounting@somewhere.com" is a distribution list, and Jane is just one of many people in that list. How can you tell? How can Plaxo tell?

Well, you can't tell unless you really know the owner of that email address. One measure we decided to take is to prevent emails going to addresses with a high probability of being a distribution list - some of these are:

all@
everyone@
staff@
employees@
finance@
managers@
sysadmins@
administrators@
users@

If you can contact me directlly, I can find out what email addresses you were sending to and I'll compare against the "prevent" list. And certainly, I want to find out where we failed to support one of our VIP members.

[kitsguru]

I too have an issue with blocking some addresses based on what may be inappropriate and arbitrary rules.

My of my contacts use info@ as their email address, a common practice in my industry.

[redgee]

I too have an issue with blocking some addresses based on what may be inappropriate and arbitrary rules.

My of my contacts use info@ as their email address, a common practice in my industry.


That's interesting. The unfortunate thing is that we've been in the middle of firefights in the past because users (inadvertently) sent update requests or invites to info@ (or some other email address they believed only went to one person). Of course, you can imagine the hailstorm of emails we received from corporations that flagged Plaxo email servers as spam source.

It did result in some organizations blacklisting our IPs because of these misunderstandings. We've taken aggressive steps that could negatively impact a few users - but we firmly believe that it prevents angering mistaken recipients of unwanted updated requests.

[kitsguru]

A comprimise would be to allow us some control over these addresses. You could flag them for us as possible maillists and allow us to confirm whether they are or not.

When you receive a complaint about an address being a maillist, you could add it to a database of known maillists and check addresses against that.

I understand your point of view but there is a better way to deal with it than the way you are now. Please put some serious thought into this. Sticking to an policy for policy sake is not condusive to good business practices.

[redgee]

Hi Kitsuguru

That's an interesting suggestion - we did think of building those controls at one time. But in the end, our concern was that many people will simply just click "YES" anyway to proceed with the send of Update Request. And it's not because they are malicious - it's because they really are convinced info@ (or the other list-like email addresses) belongs to one person.

One thing we certainly don't want to do is maintain a database of known maillists. Email addresses already are in the trillions, let alone maillists that may be in existence today but not tomorrow - we have a "prevent" measure against the top 30 or so highly probable distribution list names. That's all.

There's probably a more ingenious way of handling this problem. But this one fell into the same bucket as "what can a member do if Plaxo is blocked by a member's contact? How will that contact get the update request?" In this situation, we ask the user to directly write the contact and bypass our service. It's the same scenario in the case of email addresses that seem like distibution lists - nothing prevents the member from contacting that info@ directly and asking for an update.

But let me reassure you that this subject will be reopened with our design managers anyway. I want to make sure that we address legitimate concerns and feedback within the organization. Thank you.

[kitsguru]

I just received an update from a Plaxo member who just changed his address to info@xxx.com.
So how do you handle Plaxo members who list their address as info@
???