Ordinary Nothing

I practically always send email messages in English. Most of the people I know send email messages in English. From my side, it’s part a natural aversion (Out of habit? Too much programming and dealing with software?) to seeing non-Latin letters on a computer screen, and part the appalling lack of standards to do otherwise.

(That’s technical standards, as in how mail servers and mail readers handle things like Hebrew text. Some don’t, some badly, some very well only there are several different ways to do so and they don’t quite match. The end result is that usually reading an Hebrew email message requires some, or a lot of, work on the recipient’s end, and even then success is not entirely guaranteed.)



In any case, when I send someone here an email in English, they usually tend to reply in English, regardless of whether they prefer to use Hebrew or English themselves. And if they put in a word in Hebrew, it’s usually done in Latin characters, but quoted to indicate so. Not that for most words it’s possible to misunderstand.



Most…



I got a reply message today from a certain M, who is a friend of my very good friend V. (And M, in the highly unlikely chance that you’re reading this, just to make it absolutely clear, I am NOT making fun of you here, I am making fun of me here).

The reply was of course, like my original message, in English. All the way.

and ended with (names truncated to protect the guilty):

Thanks again and dash to V



M

At which point I’ve gotten a bit confused. Oh, alright, more than a bit. I tried to imagine what could she possibly mean by that…

The first thing that came to mind is that I was requested to send V an email with a dash (i.e. the “-” character) in it. Which made very little sense. I toyed for a few seconds with the idea of sending a message like

Hi, V!

M asked me to say – for her

Yours,

   Yaron

But decided I’d just get myself severely beaten (Is very violent, my V), and rightfully so. Scrap that idea.



The second thing was that I’m expected to drop everything and run to visit V. But while I do get to see V quite a lot on some weeks, being told to dash to her sounds very odd, and the writing style M used didn’t match. If I hadn’t spoked to V yesterday evening I might have thought something important had happened, and that I really need to go quickly. But I did, so I didn’t (Don’t you just love it when a sentence like that can actually make sense?).



Next idea was that maybe M just intended to say that she cut the message at that point since she is directly going to see V. That would be bad syntax, but not unheard of. The time frame was all wrong for that, though, as they didn’t meet last night or this morning.



At which point I’ve gotten totally stumped. Was this some clever paraphrase of the “dashed to pieces” idea? I like this usage idea enough to try and use a variation myself someday, but it would have been totally out of context here. So that’s very unlikely, and again not at all in M’s writing style up to that point.



Starting to consider replying to the message and asking (which is a big no-no, since I either admit to being an idiot that can’t understand a sentence, or imply that M is an idiot that can’t write one), the truth finally hit me.

dash wasn’t a word in English. It was in Hebrew. But it seemed natural enough to M to use it instead of an English equivalent, and to not bother quoting it.

There’s an acronym in Hebrew, pronounced like dash is, with the general meaning of sending one’s regards. The sentence could have been “Thanks again and my regards to V“, or something of the sort.

Writing in Hebrew there couldn’t have been a mistake. Acronyms are always marked as such (e.g. you would never write AFAIK, but rather AFAI”K). On a spoken conversation there also couldn’t have been a mistake, since the only other word which is pronounced the same makes even less sense than all the English versions above, unless maybe you’re an insanely focused tailor.



Problem solved.

I’m not at all certain if I should feel stupid or not. This usage is after all very common in Hebrew. And I usually do very well in spotting English words, phrases and idioms used during conversations in Hebrew… Noticing that the reverse doesn’t hold true in all cases is, well, troubling.



Oh, well. I’ll just avoid writing Native Speaker for any language in my future CVs… ;-)

Another serious goof on the Hotmail / MSN site. They’re getting good at that lately

They are posting links to their own shopping site, with a nice Shop pink! (And raise breast cancer awareness) link. That’s good.

But on some pages, the area they reserve for their sidebar with the links is a bit smaller. OK, so it does not seem smaller, and has the same width, but the pictures may be larger resulting in smaller area of text per item. To solve that they have those wonderful automated scripts that just clip the end of long sentences and replace them with ellipses. Saves space. Problem is, if the object the sentence is right at the end, it might get a bit… lost.

So on the main login page, everything is fine, when seeing various other hotmail pages everything is fine. When sending a message however, that nice clipping thingy starts to work…



End result? MSN encourages everyone to help raise breast cancer



Hmmm… Should increase their sales of related products and medicines. But I’m not sure overall it’s such a good idea for everyone. Don’t do anything MSN tells you to without thinking about it first.



Better be aware of things before you start to raise them, that’s what I always say. Mabye if they heard that, and had exhibited a tad more awareness, they wouldn’t raise anyone’s hackles…

I’m apparently a very bad worker. I saw my work hours for the last month and it turns out I had one very unproductive day in which I managed to do -11 (yes, that’s minus eleven) hours of work.



I don’t get paid by the hour, but my boss likes to feel on top of things, and prefer that we’d sign in and out of the office each day. The results are not that accurate, since I do tend to forget and later on enter approximate times (not a biggie for either of us, since money is not directly involved), but they’re generally representative.

Then all the start and end times are typed by our company’s secretary manager’s assistant into an Excel sheet, which has pre-made formulas to calculate total work time. (And just to emphasize, I did not design the thing, or was involved in it’s making in any way whatsoever. It predates me)



So how does one get such a wonderfully effective workday as I did, you ask? Simple. When entering the data to the Excel page, the start hour (approx 11:00) was dutifully copied to the Excel page. The end hour was not (Or was, but was later accidentally deleted by someone, NM). Hmmm… An empty hour field… It needs a default value… How about 00:00 ? Yes! Great!

How are the working hours calculated? By the most basic and foolproof system possible.

WorkHours = EndTime – StartTime

So if I’d come in at 11:05 at left at 21:35, I’d have 10:30 total hours of work. And if I’d come in at 11:05, and left at… say… 00:00… I’d have -11:05 hours of work. Which of course tally up into the monthly work hours, those being logically enough a simple sum of the daily work hours.

Thank goodness I don’t get pay by the hour! that could have been around two uncompensated work days , or even a bit more (The day in which I got the negative hour count, and another 11 actual hours of work to even in out).



Naturally the spreadsheet page contained no sanity checks. What errors could possibly creep up on such a simple and straightforward calculation? It’s foolproof I tell you, foolproof! And designed by someone that forgot there’s always a bigger fool.

Not that it’s that simple, mind you. What would you suggest, setting the default leaving hour to 24:00 ? We rarely leave the office that late, so the costs may be incurred by the wrong side…

Oh, wait, it’s actually quite fortunate we rarely leave the office after midnight. I mean, that would legitimately and correctly place us doing things like coming in at 9:00 and leaving at 3:00, for a total net time of -6 hours for the day… Not that bad considering we could cover most of our losses the next day and even get some actual hours of work out of it…



Then it gets funnier (sadder?). See, the same ingeniously design spreadsheet also calculates overtime hours. (No, I don’t get paid by hours, so I certainly don’t get overtime hours. Is that a reason not to bother calculating them? You think?). The formula for that is also quite simple:

OverTime = WorkHours – 9.1

Yep, 9.1 was arbitrarily decided to be the daily work hours. Can’t see why I should mind either way, considering it doesn’t effect my pay in any way, so why not?

Now can someone guess what the total productivity for this day has been for me? Let’s see:
-11 – 9.1 = -20.1

Wow! What a day, eh? I must really be something special.



Makes me so sorry I don’t come to work as late as 15:00. Now that have been really something. Not everyone can work less than minus 24 hours a day…

The login page to Hotmail has, beside the required address and password fields, various links to other content from other MSN services. Usually written as supposedly catchy phrases some PR flunky came up with to draw click-throughs.

And when you put a commercial, even if it’s a commercial to yourself, on a page that lots of people go to, you usually try to get them right. I bet they use a spell checker all the time. Making a spelling error would look really bad, after all.

The problem with spell checkers is that they find misspelled words (Well, that’s also the point of spell checkers, true. Maybe the problem is that sometime people forget that this is all what a spell checker does). They do not find wrong words which are properly spelled.



For example suppose you had an article or, a bunch of articles, like Hotmail had today, talking about various real-estate issues. What sort of text would you use to link to it? Maybe if you work for MSN, you’d like to write something like (And I’m just guessing here) 10 must-know real estate terms. Possible, no? Especially if the page linked to at the time doesn’t mention anything about real estate terms but does offer content like 7 Ways to save for your… and 8 Tips for and so on.

Well, making such a link, talking about an actual service you don’t provide, but pointing to other content in the same general area, may not be something you or I would do. That would be a misleading advertisement of sort, perhaps. Decent companies don’t do that.

What decent companies, like Microsoft, would do, is create a link to

10 most-know real estate terms

Stands to reason, no? I mean, you’ve got various 10 most-wanted lists, so it makes sense to have a 10 most know list. Nothing strange there at all. Nobody who gets paid to write these things can be expected to notice that something is slightly off there, now can they?



And maybe it also means that nobody on their payroll bothers to read those links when if they log in to the Hotmail accounts? I saw the same link with the same text there for hours. They should perhaps take this like a focus group result, or usability review, and cancel the whole thing… Saves everyone time and money…

Last night there were several terrorist attacks in Sinai, the major one practically demolishing the Hilton hotel in Taba. There were many dead and wounded. I’m not about to talk of the incident itself in here



What seems to me very odd are the complaints that Egypt delayed the rescue forces from Israel, and the accusations that more lives might have been save if the people and equipment were allowed to get there sooner.



Is this factually correct, and did the Egyptians delay the Israeli rescue efforts? I don’t know, but it seems quite plausible.

Is this a cause to attack them, blame them, or anything of the sort? Of course not! That’s totally absurd.



Sure, from the point of view of a common Israeli person, Israel is nice and honorable, and much better equipped, with more well trained rescue personal. So if there’s such an incident, involving Israelis, it seems elementary that Israel should send forces to the rescue.

And if the Egyptians don’t let us, and keep their less trained and hardly equipped personal dealing with it alone, then they must be doing so in purpose, and be guilty of whatever the delays cause.

But that’s hardly a point of view that Egypt would share. Israel and Egypt are officially at peace, but that hardly implies close friendship and trust. To expect the Egyptians to allow Israeli military personal to enter Sinai at all, that’s quite a lot as it is. If they indeed took four whole hours to do so, the amazing thing is that they agreed so quickly.



Probably, had the infrastructure in Taba better, and they could handle it with their own resources, they wouldn’t have at all. And that would have been… normal. What sovereign state would allow a neighboring country, with which it has a strenuous relationship at best, to send military forces inside its borders, without giving the matter some consideration?

Israel knows it’s only sending rescue forces, and has no intention to do anything else. Egypt can’t know that, only agree to assume that for the time being. That takes some faith. And time to realise that they’re really not equipped to handle the problem as well, and that they want to handle the problem (Not doing so would be a PR nightmare, even if someone assumes that they don’t care at all about the city or the people hurt. Personally I don’t think it’s a likely assumption, but sadly enough some people do)



Imagine a similar condition, where a hotel in Eilat is bombed, and a lot of Egyptian tourists are hurt. Now imagine that Egypt requests permission to send in military and rescue crews to assist…

I’d be shocked and amazed if Israel would say yes. I’d be shocked and amazed if the population of Israel wouldn’t be shocked and amazed in case the government said yes.

Letting Egypt insert forces and heavy equipment into a city in Israel seems like a preposterous and ridiculous idea. Why should letting Israel insert forces and heavy equipment to a city in Egypt seem so much saner?



I’m not so sure most people in Egypt realize that Israel is the good and peaceful guy, and that they are the bad guy with militant intentions that cannot be trusted. I’m sure once someone tells them, they’ll see it as clearly as we Israelis do. That should help sort matters out. I wonder why no one thought to tell them sooner… OK, that’s enough sarcasm…

So Download.com are running a poll about switching to FireFox.
And people seem surprised about the high percentage of people claiming to have already switched.



I use FireFox myself. That’s not relevant. What’s relevant is that the poll is… well… not relevant. For pretty much the same reasons most online polls aren’t, but not just.



The result are already skewed by self selection of participants. Even assuming the crowd that goes to the site, download.com, is representative of the global Internet users population, not everyone will answer the poll.

And those that answer are not randomly distributed. Most users won’t answer the poll unless they give a damn about what it’s about.

Many FireFox users today probably do, or they wouldn’t be using it. Most IE users, on the other hand, may not really have a clue what FireFox is, or what it means to them, and so have no opinion. This means that even if the poll had a FireFox?! What’s that? option, which it doesn’t, they wouldn’t bother answering.

An interesting extra data item could be the number of page hits that didn’t access the poll. But that doesn’t mean much by itself as well, since it includes people that didn’t scroll down enough, and the like.

Not to mention repeat hits, automatic scripts, and all the nice other things that usually tend to come up when someone actually pretends to take a poll seriously



In addition to that, you have various blogs and sources sending people to take the poll, such as Spread FireFox. And in fact the large majority of them (I’d say all, but I don’t have the time for a really thorough check, and one may always crop up) are very FireFox friendly. I wager you won’t catch too many Stick with IE sites telling people they can go and vote to switch to FireFox only When heck freezes over.



Besides, they can check (well, try to. Changing the user agent string and the likes is far from impossible) what browser the users used. If someone already uses FireFox, they don’t really need to vote…

Well, if someone uses IE5 they probably don’t need to vote as well ;-)



And then of course, even if the result was both reliable and representative (instead of 0 out of 2), this specific poll is still pretty pointless. It doesn’t help anyone. It doesn’t have a clear purpose.

It’s not asking what browser people are using, apart from one answer saying FireFox, and several others saying Not FireFox.

It’s not asking what features are wanted before switching to FireFox, apart from just one answer mentioning security testing (and yes, it is an issue. Of course more problems are found more frequently on IE, but Mozilla/FireFox do have their share. Am I more worried about watching a JPEG on my browser, or about watching a BMP on it? Though call…). Other reasons aren’t mentioned, so it doesn’t help any of the developers, any of the competitors, or anyone else trying to find trends..

I just can’t seem to find a good reason for the poll at all. The survey result teaches us nothing. No, wait, scrap that, it probably teaches us that CNet are about to cut some staff, since apparently they have some poll writers on the payroll with nothing to do on their hand. Interesting idea, running a poll instead of running a press release and being done with it…



And yes, I voted. What better way to see if the silly results are really like all the comments claimed?

[Update: There has been some changes on this Yahoo! issue. I'll keep tracking it]

This one is also to continue on my horrible customer support experience with Yahoo and Kana post.

The email messages’ exchange that occurred there had an amusing aspect, each message (and all seemed totally, or nearly so, machine generated) was signed with a different name of a "person" in the Yahoo! Customer Care department.

As a reminder, by order of appearance, we had:

1. Clarence
2. Lewis
3. Herbert
4. Russell
5. Tony

Out of curiosity, I decided to check my previous correspondences with Yahoo! Customer Care. Yes, I kept the messages.
This is from three separate issues, by order of appearance:

1. Frederick
2. Clarence
3. Herbert

1. Edward
2. Bridget

1. Message admitting to being automated
2. Betty
3. Henry

Each incident was on a different topic, and the first one was indeed on the same general subject matter as my latest issue.

So unless the system is designed to generate different fake names for different departments, and to make extra efforts to pretend some messages are automatic and some are human, we may actually be dealing with real live humans handling customer care.

This makes me very sad.
Having bots manage to so grossly misinterpret my problem is highly annoying, but not at all unexpected.
Having people manage to so grossly misinterpret what I write to them, and answer me by copying pre-made text clips, which are irrelevant, and which I already specified didn’t help, is very sad.
Kana and Yahoo can take real people, and make them do what an automated script can. That’s +1 brownie point for helping solve the unemployment problem, but it does not quite cover for the dumbing people down act.

Of course, the other option is that the people are not dumb, just don’t speak English. And they weren’t quite born with the names mentioned here. Maybe even aren’t called that way now and the machine assigns semi-random names to other real people.
Doesn’t make me feel much better, for some reason.

Being the most communicative guys there, you have anything to say Clarence or Herbert?

[Update: There has been some changes on this Yahoo! issue. I'll keep tracking it]

I did some more checking about the problem with Yahoo! Mail’s spam filter, from the post in which I complained about the horrible customer support experience with Yahoo and Kana.

Since I can’t seem to actually get any info to them, I’ll try posting it here. The behaviour is very peculiar.

First of all, those messages get to the Bulk folder only when the sender and the recipient are the same. I made attempts with several different Yahoo mailboxes (real ones, of friends. Creating fake addresses just for this seemed a bit too much).
Messages of the problematical format sent between different addresses arrived to the Inbox (Again, this is where ALL senders are in the address book, so unless there are user filters, they have to go to the Inbox and not the Bulk folder).
Messages in the problematical format sent from an address to the same address, arrived in the Bulk folder, even when the address is inside the address book.
The only way this would make sense is if messages where the sender and the recipient are identical are somehow more suspicious. But people do send emails to themselves, and in all my tests the messages where sent from the Yahoo! Mail web interface, and I assume they can know that, which makes the likelihood of the address being spoofed rather low.

And what about the problematical format?

All I tested where text (i.e. non-HTML) messages.
Anything on the Subject field didn’t matter, only the message Body.

The problems occurred when the body of the message consisted of a URL.
Only URLs pointing to anywhere under the http://www.geocities.com/ address caused the problem. Links to any other domain I tried in any other format, went to the Inbox as they should. This includes both random real domains, bogus domains, and other Yahoo! domains.
For the GeoCities URL, the main domain alone ( http://www.geocities.com ) does not  cause the problem. But put anything at all under it, and it will. All of these went to the Bulk folder:

• http://www.geocities.com/whatever
• http://www.geocities.com/whatever/
• http://www.geocities.com/whatever/something/
• http://www.geocities.com/whatever/something/page.html
• http://www.geocities.com/somepage.html

Also, if the URL started with http://geocities.com , there was no problem.

What about other things in the message body?
Putting even a single line of text after the URL resulted in the message getting safely to the Inbox. Putting just empty lines however resulted in the message being sent to the Bulk folder.
Putting a single line of text before the URL, with several different texts, still got the message sent to the Bulk folder.
Putting more than one line of text before the URL got it properly to the Inbox.

Strange… Very strange…

Anyway, I do hope someone from Yahoo! Mail will somehow notice this post. This is a problem, even though not a major one (Well, not major in the sense that not many people email themselves geocities links. Major in the sense that whatever is causing this problem may have other side effects, that may bite someone at a different time and context, and that that they have a system behaving differently than it should). It’s broken. They need to fix it.

I received an email message from Amazon UK, of the usual “Since you bought A you may like B” type.

I looked at the prices, and something seemed a bit strange…

The List Price clearly states £10.00, while the Our Price is a whooping £14.99. Followed by the statement You Save:, which obviously should be You Get Ripped Of:.

Nearly took a screen shot and sent it to the appropriate places like NTK’s Doh, The Humanity! or BBSpot’s BBloopers.

Instead I decided to check the website first. And lo and behold! the List Price is £19.99.
Off I went back to the message, and checked the actual message text, and true enough, the price was £19.99. The message was sent as HTML, and contained it’s own formatting and font definitions. So in this lovely small font, the 9, after being covered by the strike-through style, looked exactly like a 0.

Is this then not a bad mistake, since they didn’t in fact present a negative discount? Or is this even more of a mistake since customers thought they were getting a negative discount when the system was working properly?
I tend towards the latter. Design should not hurt customer experience when everything else is fine, especially not when probably a lot of time and money where invested in selfsame design.

Lesson: If you’re going to play with the way the text looks, make sure to check how the text actually looks.

Yet another interesting radio commercial.
This time for a local bank.

Started out interesting. They were talking about how complicated it is to do many banking operations, with lots of forms to fill, and things you need to remember to do.

Creating a clear expectation to hear that they have done perhaps some serious workflow changes at their bank, making all your banking operations simpler and easier.

Then they started to detail exactly what is it that has become simpler and hassle free:

1. When you transfer your account to them from another bank, they handle all the details for you. You need hardly do anything. Just sign for the transfer, and it’s done.

Yes. That’s it. Unlike other banks, it’s easy to transfer to them.

Naturally they didn’t feel any need to tell you why is their bank any better at other banking services. Because usually what most bank customers do most of the time is transfer to another bank.

Maybe they’re trying to go for the multitude of people that really hate their bank, but don’t particularly prefer any other one, so that if one saves them a hassle, it’ll be chosen…

Heard a wonderful radio commercial recently.

They were trying to sell a certain new book (surprising by itself, I don’t hear much book commercials on the radio), and to use one of the old tried and tested concept of telling you that the product must be good since so many people buy it.
A One billion flies can’t be wrong! Eat s–t. sort of thing.
And the more sweeping the demand for the product is, the better it must be, of course.

So if it has a huge demand in even some tiny and remote off-the-charts places, the product just has to be really great. Stands to reason.

Imagine my surprise then, between the lines about how amazing a book it is, fascinating, gripping, and so on and so forth, to hear, in a voice quivering with excitement, the equivalent of Over one million copies sold in the United States alone!.

I mean, if the tiny population of the US managed to create enough demand to buy one whole million copies of the book, why, it must be a smashing success. Imagine how many copies they buy in the medium or even large countries. The numbers must be staggering.

[Update: There has been some changes on this Yahoo! issue. I'll keep tracking it]

Among my various email addresses, I also have an account at Yahoo!. Overall quite good as far as webmail interfaces go, nice mailbox size, and certainly more than worth every penny I pay for it (which is 0 for the free account, but still).
And they have this unbelievable customer support service. Literally. Had several past interactions with them in the past, and I still can’t believe it.
The latest and newest experience has been so amazing, that I figured I just have to share.

To start with, I had a problem. I sent myself a message, from my own Yahoo account, through Yahoo!’s web interface, to the selfsame yahoo address. Just emailed myself a URL to look at later, so the body contained nothing but the URL, and the subject was short.
The message arrived at my Bulk mail folder, and not to my inbox. Personally I believe messages I send to myself should not be spam, but in any case they clearly state that messages sent from someone at the address book will never be tagged as spam. Well, my Yahoo! mail address is IN my address book. So certainly there’s a problem there. When I entered the message, it even offered a link to the AB entry.

There isn’t a direct "email our tech support" link on the site. What they have is this help system containing a hierarchy of subjects and questions, with prepared answers and info about the system. Makes sense, and does contain all the basic explanations. No complaints from me here up to this point. If you want something beyond that, each item has at the end a Was this information enough? sort of question at the bottom, with Yes and No buttons. Press "NO", and you go to a page where you can fill a form with your question, which will be directed to customer support. Just what I wanted.

Ahem. Problem one. All these "No" buttons under subjects relating to spam send you to a form used to complain about a spam message that got to your inbox. Not quite relevant. Actually, if you go to the question of What do I do if I receive solicited mail in my bulk mail folder?, and answer Is this enough information? with "No", you’ll get to a page letting you report a spam message. Highly relevant indeed.

So I decided to get smart, and went to the AB section, to a topic with a text telling me that messages from people in my AB will not be directed to the Bulk folder. Right.
Pressed the nice "No" button, and reported the following (email address posted here is not the real one I used):

I’ve recently sent an email message to myself (ment as a short note), that arrived to the bulk mail folder.

The message was sent through the yahoo web interface, from this yahoo account I’m using (me@yahoo.com), to the exact same account, and selected by the autocomplete feature.

The address was of course correct, since the message did arrive.

The address is in the address book, and once I moved the message from the Bulk folder to the Inbox folder, it showed the rolodex icon.

Yet despite the sender being:
A. Me, same address as the recipient.
B. In my (the recipient) address book.
C. Obviously not spoofed since the mesasge was sent through the Yahoo web interface.
it was still directed to the Bulk folder.

Please check your spam detection method, since B is officially stated as a way to make sure messages won’t be tagged as spam, and it makes a lot of sense for A+B to serve a similar purpose.

Should be clear enough, I think. Enough info to get the main points. At least IMHO.
Well… Not quite. Got a lovely email in return, which I won’t entirely quote due to size limitation. The email consisted of several texts copied nearly verbatim from the help system (The same one that didn’t help me). Best parts were:

If you believe a message that has been delivered to your Bulk Mail Folder is more appropriately delivered to your Inbox, please open the message, and click the "Not spam" button.
By sending examples of "spam" and messages you feel are "not spam" to Yahoo! for review, it will  increase the effectiveness of SpamGuard, Yahoo! Mail’s filtering system. Yahoo! will use the messages you send to constantly improve the SpamGuard technology.

If you demand even greater Spam prevention [...]

The rolodex icon appears next to messages that are from people in your Yahoo! Address Book. This feature allows you to quickly identify messages that you wish to receive. Messages from your contacts will always be delivered to your Inbox, unless you set up a filter to deliver it elsewhere. 

So I can send them my message for review, and let them or their system decide if they want to recognize myself, or a random link I send myself, as not spam.
And I got long explanation about how to get better spam protection, since let’s face it, my problam was exactly getting too much spam…. Or not.
And the best thing, I don’t really have this problem, since message from people in my AB will always be delivered to my inbox.

Seems that an automated process parsed my message, found words it liked, and sent the appropriate texts that I already said didn’t help me.
Cool. Can it get any better than that?
[Dramatic pause]
Sure it can. In the meantime, as a side note, message was signed by Clarence. Nice to know a person gave his name to this mild drivel.

Well, I’m not the one to be deterred by being ignored once. So on I go, pretending for the moment that maybe Clarence is actually a person, and can understand English, despite evidance to the contrary.

Thank you for automatically replying to me with standard stock texts without actually bothering to read what I asked about.

The text you quote here however is demonstratebly incorrect / false / erronous / etc…

A message from someone IN MY ADRESSESBOOK, next to which the rolodex icon DID SHOW, was delivered NOT to my inbox, but rather to the BULK folder.
This is in strict contrast to your statement that "Messages from your contacts will always be delivered
to your Inbox".
This is why I asked that you check the work of your filters.
It does not work as it should be.

I find the fact that the same contact (which is IN MY ADDRESSBOOK) is actually me, using the exact same Yahoo email address, to be more bothersome, but there’s nothing about that in your stock texts, so I won’t bother to comment on it again.

I do not need to send to your spam review messages sent by me, by someone in my addressbook. These should go to the inbox, regardless of content. Always.

Additionally, on a different matter, don’t quote these stock texts to people. The texts are already published on your help site. I read through the text before being able to get to the form used to sent this
message, and obviously it wasn’t relevant or helpful, so why give it back again?

Yes, yes, I’m a nice, kind and polite person. Always has been.
On my defence, as I already written, this is not exactly my first time trying to get something out of their customer support. The last times however were a "How can I…" and a "Can I…" questions, so I gave up once I got the answer is no.

Anyway, I got a reply right back.
Again, edited for highlights:

Filters automatically sort your incoming messages into the folders of your choice, according to rules that you set up. [... tons of info about setting up filters/rules, copied from the pages in help system, of course ...]

Yahoo! Mail automatically blocks unsolicited email (commonly known as "spam") from known bulk emailers. This service doesn’t guarantee that we can catch all unsolicited email, but we’ll sure try.

Are they trying to say the message got to my Bulk folder because I set a filter directing it there?
‘Cause I didn’t. I even double checked, just to be on the safe side (and avoid slander lawsuits).
Or are they saying I need to set a filter directing messages from myself to go to my Inbox, depsite myself being in the AB? Doesn’t make that much sense either.

And it’s really great at this point to know that maybe they believe the problem to be that my email address is a known bulk emailer. Yep, this must be it. What I should do is not complain that my message got to the Bulk folder, but that they let a bulk emailer use their services freely without terminating my account for breach of the terms of service… On second thought, this didn’t strike me as too sensible either.

So are we dealing with an automated system, or with outsourcing to persons that don’t speak English but can recognize key words and copy texts?
This new message, BTW, was signed by a different "person", called Lewis, so either they don’t believe in letting one person stay on an open issue, or I got higher up the hierarchy. Riiight.

Well, a close look at the message headers reveals at least two interesting things:

• Received: from seanymph.cc.kana.corp.yahoo.com (seanymph.cc.kana.corp.yahoo.com [207.126.228.30]) …
• X-Mailer: KANA Response 7.0.1.116

Aha!
Who or what is Kana, then? Well, a quick search found a Kana site, that seemed close enough to the spot to be it, and to stop looking for more. If there’s more than one Kana doing the same things, I think they should start suing each other for trademark infringement or something.

A long PR Flash animation on the homepage, letting you know how much they can save you by automating customer service and provide knowledge base management. Then there is the KANA email response management page. Which goes (bold is mine):

KANA email response management delivers the proven solution to the email crisis. An extensive array of tools automates the handling of high volume email, Web form and chat, helping contact centers significantly reduce manual handling and response times. Uniquely, KANA blends email management with customer self-service to simultaneously maximize contact center efficiency and deliver a consistent, integrated inquiry resolution experience that increases everyone’s satisfaction.

E-Mail Response Management Highlights

Automated E-mail Management — Productivity tools minimize costly manual handling, reduce agent workload and increase the consistency and accuracy of response.

    * Automatically route messages to work queues, priority queues and department queues.
    * Automatically respond to or acknowledge emails.
    * Set up email management by department to reflect each department’s specific processes.
    * Escalate complex inquires to contact center case status with the click of a button.
    * Run real-time reports and use service analytics to identify ways to improve contact center operations.

Self Service Integration — With links to solutions in the knowledgebase included in e-mail responses, customers can resolve inquiries on their own, increasing their satisfaction while reducing the need for costly agent assistance.

    * Include links to specific articles in auto-acknowledgements and auto-responses.
    * Automatically close and remove cases resolved through self-service.
    * Allow customers to escalate unresolved inquiries to agents with the click of a button.

Seems like what I was getting, alright. Except that I didn’t get the ability to escalate unresolved inquiries to agents with the click of a button anywhere. Darn. Nor did I feal much accuracy. Lot’s of automated responses and text from the knowledge base, though. Half-truths in advertising? Shocking. How could I completly and totally trust another PR text ever again?!

But there may be a way to progress. I just need to push in words that may trigger the system to realizing that the customer is not happy and the problem is not resolved. Assuming Yahoo! actually bought the get-this-to-a-real-person-eventually module. Not such an obvious assumption, I’ll grant you.
Time to get mean. I was too kind and polite so far. I have proof.

Dear automatic Kana bot,
Could you please, just so I’d know where I’m standing on this, either:
A. Pass this to a real live actual person who will actually read what my problem was and answer
relevantly about the subject.
B. Just tell me that no one will ever bother to actaully read my message so I should give up and stop trying to get an answer.

Simple, short, elegant, and contain words like Kana, Bot, real, live, person, relevantly, bother, tell me, no one. Something have to get a hit. Well, in a sense, something did…

We are concerned about this problem that you experienced. If you continue to have problems with this issue, we would like to investigate in further detail.

For us to look into the problem you have encountered, it will be necessary for Yahoo! staff to enter your account and conduct some tests.
Please reply to this message, giving Yahoo! permission to enter your Yahoo! Mail account and take those steps necessary to pinpoint the cause of this problem and explore possible solutions.

If the problem you’re reporting is with a specific message or messages, please let us know the exact name that appears in the "Sender" column, the exact "Subject" of the message, and the exact folder the message(s) is/are located in.

Signed by Herbert in case you were wondering.
Now, asking me to give them the exact sender name is pointless, since they got it on my first message from my account name and sender name on the emails I send them. Apart from that, maybe finally someone want to check the issue.
That’s good.

Them getting into my mailbox with my permission, not so good. Of course they are technically capable of doing this without asking me, but they shouldn’t. And the problem is general and not with my accout, so there’s no reason for them to do this.

What I can do in order to be nice, is to provide more details about what exactly causes the problem.
So I went testing.
Turns out that the problem happens whenever the body of an email message, sent from a Yahoo! mail account (yep, sending the same message to Yahoo from a Hotmail address, for example, gets the message to the Inbox.), in which the body consists of a URL to anything under GeoCities, will get the message to the bulk folder.
I go to compose a message from the web intefrace, put whatever I want on the subject line, then put on the body one line with "http://www.geocities.com/whatever/", in which whatever can be about anything, and there can be anything under it ("http://www.geocities.com/whatever/there/is/here.html"). And send it to myself, picking myself out of the AB.
Wham. Message goes to the Bulk folder.
Maybe Yahoo have something against GeoCities. It must be run by a competitor company that they really hate, and used exclusively to send spam messages. Right? Right?
Could have been a marvelous idea. Except for the minor fact that Yahoo! owns GeoCities, it’s a Yahoo! site. Has been for years.
Oh, heck, there are days when I hate myself. I suppose a web services company can hate itself as well. No laws against that, AFAIK.

So let’s just let them know. By now I must be flagged to get to a real person (Is Herbert for real?), but just in case let’s make sure that the automated system doesn’t tell them to go search in my account. Have to be carefull with something too automated to even be considered as bright as a dumb moron.

NO. The problem is general, and NOT just with my account, so there is NO justification for you to see any of my mail or enter my account.

To make it clear: You do not have my permission to enter my account.

I can however provide you with enough details to reproduce the problem on any other account you want:

1. Compose a new message from Yahoo web interface.
2. make sure the body contains only a link of the form http://www.geocities.com/whatever/
3. As far as I can see, you can replace "whatever" with anything, and add any subdirectories or html
pages after it inside the link.
4. Write anything you want on the "Subject" field.
5. Send the message to a Yahoo recipient.

That’s it. The message gets inside the bulk folder of the recipient, even if the sender is in the address book.

Why do you have anything that filters messages with a higher priority than checking the AB for approved
senders is beyond me.
Certainly I don’t know why the need to block anything pointing to a geocities site, considering the owner…

But that’s it.

In my case, I sent the message from myself to myself, using this account, so I suppose (after I wrote that a few times already) you can get the exact "Sender" name used, without asking me for it…

Can’t get any more obvious than that. Can’t. Crystal clear. They just HAVE to get it now. Right? Right? Please?

And I got a response. One I didn’t quite expect, though I suppose I should have.

You can move the message back to your Inbox by doing the following:
1. Log into your Yahoo! Mail Account
2. Go to your "Trash" folder by clicking on the "Trash" link
[...]
Also, when marking the message as spam you may have inadvertently chosen to block the sender’s address.  We recommend checking this option and removing the sender’s email address from the "Blocked Addresses" list to be able to receive email messages from that particular sender in future.
[...]
To remove ("unblock") an address or domain from the list, do the following:
[...]
We hope this information helps you complete your request. If not, please reply to this email and we will be happy to assist you further.

Signed by non other then Russell himself. Yep, another brand new name.
And here I was expecting someone may read my problem, or pay a bit of attention. It felt so close… So close…

They did ask to let them know if by some unforeseen way they did not manage to quite help me complete my request. Would only be polite to let them know.

Hello,
Not only did this did not help, but it completly ignores my actual problem and the information I sent to you about it.

There. Take that.
I’m getting tired of this. Broken and beaten. Very close to letting the matter lie in quiet and stop bothering the tech support staff computers.

I did get a reply, though.

We appreciate you following up with us and sincerely apologize for any inconvenience.

Please note that, our intent is to send solicited emails (those bulk messages you have requested) to your Inbox; however, we may occasionally send these messages to your Bulk Mail folder.

If this occurs, you can click on the "Not Spam" button, located in every message.  By sending examples of spam to Yahoo! for review, it will increase the effectiveness of Spamguard, Yahoo! Mail’s filtering system.
Yahoo! will use the messages you send to constantly improve the Spamguard technology.

Again, we apologize for any inconvenience caused to you and appreciate your patience and understanding.

This time sent by Tony. Welcome to the growing Yahoo! Customer Support team, Tony. I wonder if the name are chosen at random, or if they have a list and are purposefully trying to pick a new name every time.

Again they managed to miss the actual problem and events, though they did get the very general gist of a message going to the Bulk folder erronously.

They apologized however, and are sorry that they can’t help me. Would have warmed my heart if an actual person sent it or meant it (You know, at least it means someone tried).

I think that at least with that I can pretend that it’s not me giving up, but them. I beat them. They can’t help me, and have admitted it. Hurray for me!
Eh… wait… I still have a problem that wasn’t solved, and nobody knows about it…

Sigh.

Hello everybody (This being the one post nobody will probably read, as this blog is brand new, and I’m not linking out of this post, saying everybody might be a bit too much. But Hello nobody won’t be proper in case someone do come in, so there).

I have now officially joined the (small but oh, so very loud) ranks of the blogging masses.
Not quite sure what I think about it, but I suppose my overall attitude has to be positive, or I wouldn’t have done it. Makes sense. Question is if I do.

So let’s go over some technical details.

Individual archives for all posts. I really Hate Don’t like those multiple posts in one page. Makes it very hard to find something, or to link to something. Named anchors are a wonderful concept, but regularly seem to fail miserably on the real world.

Comments would be open for all posts. Of course part of the reason is that I don’t expect much, so can leave the possibility open. Even was it otherwise, I would still try to leave comments open. If someone wants to… well… comment, then they should be able to.
I do reserve the right, however, to change my mind at the future if for some inexplicable reason I find my posts pulling in comment spam or flame wars. Shouldn’t happen in the foreseeable future, though.

No explicit spellchecking will be done on posts, unless I catch myself in some dreadfully embarrassing mistakes, or unless someone else complains.
Meaning I won’t take the whole post and run it through a spellchecker. I would however not insert spelling mistakes on purpose. I would also try to read posts at least once before posting, so I have a decent chance of catching glaringly obvious errors. Or not.
Although I probably will change my opinion on this one if I actually get readers. It’s just not worth the effort when only I read it.

Feed will contain full text of posts. I don’t expect any serious bandwidth problems anytime soon… ;-)

As for what I’ll be posting about… I don’t have any clear ideas except for the next few posts. Those however should not be taken as thematically representative, just as some things I want to get off my chest about now. I hope in time I’ll find myself either focusing better, or not focusing but not caring about it.
Time will tell.

That’s it for now.