It isn’t asking too much.

Posted Tue 23 Jan
2 comments so far

There was my cancellation last night, done via the most woeful interface ever. I got there in the end, though. This morning, I suppose when the staff got into work, I got a reply, justifying the need for identification. Actually, it wasn’t justification, it was merely stating the different ways I can identify myself to them. *sigh* I. Want. It. Cancelled.

I reply. Without hesitiation. And expand on my comments from last night. I mean, the customer service team reply, you would think I could reply to the email they send. But no. You can’t. No dialogue allowed. I get an error mail back. And when I say an error mail, I mean a malformed message. HTML only. So it looks like raw HTML to me. In mutt. Which is what I use to read my mail during work hours. Absolute cack-handed baboons, they are.

q:Exit  s:Save  |:Pipe  p:Print  ?:Help
1     [text/html, 7bit, iso-8859-1, 8.6K]
...
i:Exit  -:PrevPg  :NextPg v:View Attachm.  
d:Del  r:Reply  j:Next ?:Help
From: Team Pixmania 
To: me
Subject: Your email enquiry has been registered
Date: Tue, 23 Jan 2007 11:46:08 +0100 (CET)

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC \"-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN\">
<html>
<style>
A {TEXT-DECORATION: none}
A:hover {TEXT-DECORATION: underline}
.lienviolet             {font-family: ...}
.minilienviolet         {font-family: ...}
/*
... ad nauseum...

Which sends me *back* to the web page, to select from numerous dropdowns to get to the cancel section. Again. Without the benefit of interjecting my comments into theirs. In what would normally be an email conversation. No, nothing like that with them. Hoops ringed with fire.

What will happen next? Stay tuned to see if I can get more annoyed with them.

People I know

I know people who didn't work at BlackStar, and they have weblogs too. These are they.

html email is not the end of the world. this is 2007, it’s not so unreasonable to expect mail clients to support html. is it?

1
dave rodgman
Tue 23 Jan, 11:35PM

Hi Dave.

No, it isn’t the end of the world, but would it be that hard for them to make a properly formed message, with a text part? So I can read it? Or even if the text part says ‘Come out of the Dark Ages, heathen!’, that is alright (those spammy Apple emails do something like that).

But it isn’t a proper email, that is all. Much as I amn’t a conformist, dammit, mail should conform to the standard.

2
Stray Taoist
Wed 24 Jan, 8:53AM