It’d be real interesting to open-source this somehow, produce a useable open or quasi open (maybe curated somehow) reputation score for email. Ms. Lady Benjamin PD Cannon, ASCE 6x7 Networks & 6x7 Telecom, LLC CEO ben@6by7.net "The only fully end-to-end encrypted global telecommunications company in the world.” FCC License KJ6FJJ Sent from my iPhone via RFC1149.
On Dec 30, 2020, at 3:04 PM, Rich Kulawiec <rsk@gsp.org> wrote:
On Tue, Dec 22, 2020 at 10:41:43PM -0700, Wayne Bouchard wrote:
And if the last 15 years has shown us anything, it is that when you can't get past the auto-attendant and talk to a real human, and if that person can't talk to you like a person instead of reading scripts at you, your stress levels go way up as does your desire to break things. Automation in customer service (or excessive emphasis on procedures) is a really nice way of taking a five minute problem and turning it into an hour long ordeal.
There are some easy methods for service/support organizations to decrease the pain that this inflicts on people reporting problems.
For example, one thing that I've taught people to do is to make liberal use of procmail in order to sort incoming traffic to role accounts. It requires diligence, but that diligence is repaid many times over by how it expedites dealing with problems. A simple example of this is that when a problem report is received at the RFC 2142 security@ role address, and it's clueful, well-written, and important, a procmail rule gets created for the sending address so that all future messages from that address are prioritized...because it obviously came from someone who knows what the heck they're doing and did us a favor by telling us that we have a problem. Chances are that any future messages from them will be similarly helpful and that if we respond to those quickly we may be able to forestall a lot more messages that aren't going to be as clueful.
The opposite thing is done with clueless/misdirected/etc. reports: they're not discarded, but they go into the low-priority queue.
Everything else goes somewhere in the middle.
Repeated hundreds or thousands of times over many years, this builds a ruleset that pre-sorts messages rather well. It's not perfect, it's not foolproof, but it helps us *and* it helps lower the frustration level of people sending clueful messages, because it better positions us to read, act on, and respond to those. Those people are catching our mistakes, the least we can do is try to pay attention.
(Hint: a useful way to begin building such a ruleset is to grab all the addresses from NANOG, dnsops, outages, etc. and pre-load the ruleset with them...because traffic received at role accounts from participants in these mailing lists is probably useful.)
---rsk