Betalogue

With spam, viruses, and what not, it’s already hard enough to manage one’s e-mail these days.

In order to prevent Mail’s junk mail filter from making errors and flagging as junk legitimate e-mail messages coming from reputable vendors such as Amazon, I tend to create Address Book entries for such vendors, which I then add to a group called “Shopping”. And I have a rule in Mail that matches incoming mail against members of my “Shopping” group and change them to a specific colour. The rule uses the “Sender is member of group” criterion.

This way, whenever I have a new vendor to add, I just go to Address Book, create a new entry for that vendor in my “Shopping” group, and add their e-mail address. Automatically, the vendor will be added to the list of e-mail addresses that Mail uses in my “Shopping” rule to detect e-mail coming from legitimate vendors.

The trouble is, quite simply, that vendors such as Amazon have a tendency to use a large number of different e-mail addresses. For Amazon.com only, I have:

• orders@amazon.com
• auto-confirm@amazon.com
• order-update@amazon.com
• ship-confirm@amazon.com
• video@amazon.com
• new-for-you@amazon.com
• book-news@amazon.com
• store-news@amazon.com

I have even more for Amazon.co.uk and Amazon.fr.

Each time I receive an e-mail from one of these vendors that uses yet another e-mail address, of course my “Shopping” rule doesn’t catch it, and I run the risk of seeing Mail flag it as junk mail and move it automatically to my Junk folder. And I have to manually add the other e-mail address to the list of possible e-mail addresses for this vendor.

It would be OK if these e-mail addresses were stable. For example, I can understand the distinctions made by Amazon.com between order confirmations and shipping notifications. But sometimes it goes too far. For example, for the past couple of years, all the shipping notifications coming from Amazon.fr have been sent to me using the address commandes@amazon.fr. And that was fine with me. But now, all of a sudden, without any warning, they have decided to send shipping notifications from a different address, confirmation-envoi@amazon.fr.

Of course, this e-mail address was not part of my Address Book record for Amazon.fr, and the message was not detected by my “Shopping” rule. Fortunately, it was not flagged as junk mail either. But still… Why the change, after two years?

Some would probably argue that I should change my rule and use a different criterion, one that detects any e-mail address that contains “amazon.fr” anywhere in it. This way, even if Amazon.fr change their addresses again, they will still be detected by my “Shopping” rule.

There are several problems with that. One of them is that there are vendors who sometimes use addresses that do not contain the expected string “vendor.com“, because they use a third-party for e-mail communications, for example, or some weird mailing system.

The other one is that, while I still have to maintain a record in my Address Book for each vendor (for communications from me to the vendor), this record is no longer used for communications from the vendor to me. For such communications, Mail uses the information typed out in the rule criterion itself instead. This goes against common sense, and is a source of redundancy, which further complicates address management.

The bottom-line is that vendors need to be a little more careful when it comes to their e-mail addresses. It’s OK to change e-mail addresses without notifying one’s customers if the customers don’t rely on these addresses. But user-defined e-mail filters do rely on such information. So it needs to be fairly stable. My experience, even with reputable vendors that have been around for a long time, is that they keep changing their e-mail addresses for no really valid reason from the customer’s point of view.

This entry was posted by Pierre Igot on Thursday, March 18th, 2004 at 2:16 am and is filed under Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.