Winge of the week

[Sylvia Else]

Companies that provide contact forms on their websites, but either do
not monitor wherever those forms end up, or just don't reply to them.

On two occasions, I've tried to get information, without success, and
end up resorting to phoning them.

Memo to businesses: If you don't want to handle web/email queries, don't
provide the option. That way, you won't annoy potential customers quite
so much.

Sylvia.

[RS Wood]

Post by Sylvia Else
Companies that provide contact forms on their websites, but either do
not monitor wherever those forms end up, or just don't reply to them.
On two occasions, I've tried to get information, without success, and
end up resorting to phoning them.
Memo to businesses: If you don't want to handle web/email queries, don't
provide the option. That way, you won't annoy potential customers quite
so much.
Sylvia.

There are a precious few firms left on earth, whose "contact us" button
opens an email on your mail client. That makes me happy, as web forms are
annoying. (Not sure if one works better than the other, but I for sure
would prefer a sendmail box with procmail receiving all incoming messages
and routing to different agents based on key words. (I'll handle personally
all messages containing profanity, ha ha ha).

[Sylvia Else]

Post by RS Wood

Post by Sylvia Else
Companies that provide contact forms on their websites, but either do
not monitor wherever those forms end up, or just don't reply to them.
On two occasions, I've tried to get information, without success, and
end up resorting to phoning them.
Memo to businesses: If you don't want to handle web/email queries, don't
provide the option. That way, you won't annoy potential customers quite
so much.
Sylvia.

There are a precious few firms left on earth, whose "contact us" button
opens an email on your mail client. That makes me happy, as web forms are
annoying.

That's certainly the case where you're given a scrolling box about 30
characters wide and 5 lines high, in which to put what may be a
complicated message. I often end up composing it an email client, then
copy and pasting into the box.

Sylvia.

[Huge]

Post by Sylvia Else

Post by RS Wood

Post by Sylvia Else
Companies that provide contact forms on their websites, but either do
not monitor wherever those forms end up, or just don't reply to them.
On two occasions, I've tried to get information, without success, and
end up resorting to phoning them.
Memo to businesses: If you don't want to handle web/email queries, don't
provide the option. That way, you won't annoy potential customers quite
so much.
Sylvia.

There are a precious few firms left on earth, whose "contact us" button
opens an email on your mail client. That makes me happy, as web forms are
annoying.

That's certainly the case where you're given a scrolling box about 30
characters wide and 5 lines high, in which to put what may be a
complicated message. I often end up composing it an email client, then
copy and pasting into the box.

I always do this, since it's the only way to get a record of what you said.

[Huge]

Post by RS Wood

Post by Sylvia Else
Companies that provide contact forms on their websites, but either do
not monitor wherever those forms end up, or just don't reply to them.
On two occasions, I've tried to get information, without success, and
end up resorting to phoning them.
Memo to businesses: If you don't want to handle web/email queries, don't
provide the option. That way, you won't annoy potential customers quite
so much.
Sylvia.

There are a precious few firms left on earth, whose "contact us" button
opens an email on your mail client. That makes me happy, as web forms are
annoying. (Not sure if one works better than the other, but I for sure
would prefer a sendmail box with procmail receiving all incoming messages
and routing to different agents based on key words. (I'll handle personally
all messages containing profanity, ha ha ha).

Apparently email is dying. (Not that you'd know it from the amount of
spam I get). The "yoof" prefer WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger and so on.

[Andy Burns]

Post by Huge
Apparently email is dying. (Not that you'd know it from the amount of
spam I get). The "yoof" prefer WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger and so on.

When some other method is used to send password resets for WhatsApp,
Facebook and so on, I'll believe email is dying ...

[Huge]

Post by Andy Burns

Post by Huge
Apparently email is dying. (Not that you'd know it from the amount of
spam I get). The "yoof" prefer WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger and so on.

When some other method is used to send password resets for WhatsApp,
Facebook and so on, I'll believe email is dying ...

I meant for people talking to one another, but I take your point.

[Scott Alfter]

Post by Huge

Post by RS Wood
There are a precious few firms left on earth, whose "contact us" button
opens an email on your mail client. That makes me happy, as web forms are
annoying.

Apparently email is dying. (Not that you'd know it from the amount of
spam I get). The "yoof" prefer WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger and so on.

...all of which at some point will end up reimplementing email poorly. :-P

_/_
/ v \ Scott Alfter (remove the obvious to send mail)
(IIGS( https://alfter.us/ Top-posting!
\_^_/ >What's the most annoying thing on Usenet?

[Huge]

Post by Scott Alfter

Post by Huge

Post by RS Wood
There are a precious few firms left on earth, whose "contact us" button
opens an email on your mail client. That makes me happy, as web forms are
annoying.

Apparently email is dying. (Not that you'd know it from the amount of
spam I get). The "yoof" prefer WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger and so on.

...all of which at some point will end up reimplementing email poorly. :-P

Sadly, very true. In fact, all this social media shit just seems to
be ripped off from existing Internet systems, redone so they can be
monetised and the users spied on.

[Theo]

Post by Scott Alfter

Post by Huge
Apparently email is dying. (Not that you'd know it from the amount of
spam I get). The "yoof" prefer WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger and so on.

...all of which at some point will end up reimplementing email poorly. :-P

Not to forget the 'secure messaging' systems that send you a message telling
you they sent you a message. Which of course you can't read on your email
client, you have to login to their website to read it. All of which are
different, and messages randomly expire and vanish when you close your
account.

Meanwhile PGP has been a thing for 20 years...

Theo

[Richard Kettlewell]

Post by Theo

Post by Scott Alfter

Post by Huge
Apparently email is dying. (Not that you'd know it from the amount of
spam I get). The "yoof" prefer WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger and so on.

...all of which at some point will end up reimplementing email poorly. :-P

Not to forget the 'secure messaging' systems that send you a message telling
you they sent you a message. Which of course you can't read on your email
client, you have to login to their website to read it. All of which are
different, and messages randomly expire and vanish when you close your
account.
Meanwhile PGP has been a thing for 20 years...

...during which its UI has not noticably improved. I don’t think it’s
really suitable for mass adoption.

[Huge]

Post by Richard Kettlewell

Post by Theo

Post by Scott Alfter

Post by Huge
Apparently email is dying. (Not that you'd know it from the amount of
spam I get). The "yoof" prefer WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger and so on.

...all of which at some point will end up reimplementing email poorly. :-P

Not to forget the 'secure messaging' systems that send you a message telling
you they sent you a message. Which of course you can't read on your email
client, you have to login to their website to read it. All of which are
different, and messages randomly expire and vanish when you close your
account.
Meanwhile PGP has been a thing for 20 years...

...during which its UI has not noticably improved. I don’t think it’s
really suitable for mass adoption.

Very true. Although the UX is only part of it.

[Scott Alfter]

Post by Theo

Post by Scott Alfter

Post by Huge
Apparently email is dying. (Not that you'd know it from the amount of
spam I get). The "yoof" prefer WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger and so on.

...all of which at some point will end up reimplementing email poorly. :-P

Not to forget the 'secure messaging' systems that send you a message telling
you they sent you a message. Which of course you can't read on your email
client, you have to login to their website to read it. All of which are
different, and messages randomly expire and vanish when you close your
account.
Meanwhile PGP has been a thing for 20 years...

...during which its UI has not noticably improved. I don’t think it’s
really suitable for mass adoption.

Between Thunderbird on my computers and K9 Mail on my phone, it's not too
bad. I've even set up my mail server so that if mail arrives without
encryption, it's encrypted on its way to the IMAP folder. With this, my
email is now encrypted at rest on the server. Given that the server isn't
under my physical control (it's a VPS on the other side of the Atlantic),
this is a nice capability to have. It does require punching in a passphrase
periodically to read email, and it makes searching the archive problematic,
but it works well enough.

_/_
/ v \ Scott Alfter (remove the obvious to send mail)
(IIGS( https://alfter.us/ Top-posting!
\_^_/ >What's the most annoying thing on Usenet?

[Huge]

Post by Theo

Post by Scott Alfter

Post by Huge
Apparently email is dying. (Not that you'd know it from the amount of
spam I get). The "yoof" prefer WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger and so on.

...all of which at some point will end up reimplementing email poorly. :-P

Not to forget the 'secure messaging' systems that send you a message telling
you they sent you a message. Which of course you can't read on your email
client, you have to login to their website to read it. All of which are
different, and messages randomly expire and vanish when you close your
account.
Meanwhile PGP has been a thing for 20 years...

Having been involved in setting up at least two secure email systems for
a large corporate to communicate with its customers, I can assure you
that PGP is *way* too complicated for the average member of the public
to use. Hell, it's too complicated for a lot of IT literate people.

The only way encrypted email will ever become ubiquitous is if
it is transparent, automatic and the default.

[Theo]

Post by Huge
Having been involved in setting up at least two secure email systems for
a large corporate to communicate with its customers, I can assure you
that PGP is *way* too complicated for the average member of the public
to use. Hell, it's too complicated for a lot of IT literate people.
The only way encrypted email will ever become ubiquitous is if
it is transparent, automatic and the default.

Completely agreed. But the solution should be to fix the UX (maybe by not
using PGP) so that all email is 'secure' (FSVO), rather than individual
companies balkanising into each building their own 'secure message' system
which doesn't talk to anyone else's secure message system.

As well as bad consequences for things like legal action (if I sue my bank,
the bank can make all the correspondence disappear) it has the problem that
I can't initiate a three-way conversation between bank A and bank B about,
say, a missing transfer. In real life it forces people to do silliness like
calling each from two phones and putting speakers to earpieces.

Building decentralised systems is hard - but that's not a reason not to do
it.

Theo

[Huge]

Post by Theo

Post by Huge
Having been involved in setting up at least two secure email systems for
a large corporate to communicate with its customers, I can assure you
that PGP is *way* too complicated for the average member of the public
to use. Hell, it's too complicated for a lot of IT literate people.
The only way

I should have included the words "end-to-end" here. One of the things we
did at ${MEGABANK} was slowly, over a period of years, enforce mandatory
TLS on all outbound mail (if your recipient couldn't do TLS, your email
bounced back to you with an error message). We had to do it slowly
because you'd be amazed (and horrified) how many institutions couldn't
(or wouldn't) use TLS for email, and how long it took them to fix it. We
had opportunistic TLS incoming as well, and the email system added a
"padlock" icon to the displayed email; closed if it had been sent using
and open otherwise.

It also took a long time because of the user and helpdesk education
required. I spent a lot of time flying round the world presenting about
email security to managers, both IT and business.

We also put in a PGP Universal server, which worked so poorly (for all
kinds of reasons, most of them non-technical) that we took it out again.

I'm still scarred by the whole experience. :o)

Post by Theo

Post by Huge
encrypted email will ever become ubiquitous is if
it is transparent, automatic and the default.

Completely agreed. But the solution should be to fix the UX (maybe by not
using PGP) so that all email is 'secure' (FSVO), rather than individual
companies balkanising into each building their own 'secure message' system
which doesn't talk to anyone else's secure message system.

See above. TLS solves this. But what it doesn't do is provide end-to-end
encryption, which is required in some regulated industries. Oh and you
also need to provide for legal discovery, even if the people have left and
deleted their keys and key recovery for when your users forget their
passphrases. It's a nightmare.

Post by Theo
As well as bad consequences for things like legal action (if I sue my bank,
the bank can make all the correspondence disappear) it has the problem that
I can't initiate a three-way conversation between bank A and bank B about,
say, a missing transfer. In real life it forces people to do silliness like
calling each from two phones and putting speakers to earpieces.
Building decentralised systems is hard - but that's not a reason not to do
it.

True. But it still gives me nightmares.

(Not really. I'm retired. I no longer GAS, except as an end user.)

[Richard Kettlewell]

Post by Huge

Post by Theo
Meanwhile PGP has been a thing for 20 years...

Having been involved in setting up at least two secure email systems
for a large corporate to communicate with its customers, I can assure
you that PGP is *way* too complicated for the average member of the
public to use. Hell, it's too complicated for a lot of IT literate
people.

I have had to resort to reading the source to figure out what GPG was
asking me on at least one occasion.

Post by Huge
The only way encrypted email will ever become ubiquitous is if
it is transparent, automatic and the default.

...which probably wouldn’t help anyway since AFAIK almot all real
attacks on email confidentiality don’t work by intercepting it in
transit, they work by credential theft (and while you can mitigate this
with separate credentials for key use, as PGP integrations usually do,
that would not be transparent).

[Bob Eager]

Post by Richard Kettlewell

Post by Huge

Post by Theo
Meanwhile PGP has been a thing for 20 years...

Having been involved in setting up at least two secure email systems
for a large corporate to communicate with its customers, I can assure
you that PGP is *way* too complicated for the average member of the
public to use. Hell, it's too complicated for a lot of IT literate
people.

I have had to resort to reading the source to figure out what GPG was
asking me on at least one occasion.

The Michael W Lucas book is invaluable:

https://www.nostarch.com/pgp.htm

[Huge]

Post by Richard Kettlewell

Post by Huge

Post by Theo
Meanwhile PGP has been a thing for 20 years...

Having been involved in setting up at least two secure email systems
for a large corporate to communicate with its customers, I can assure
you that PGP is *way* too complicated for the average member of the
public to use. Hell, it's too complicated for a lot of IT literate
people.

I have had to resort to reading the source to figure out what GPG was
asking me on at least one occasion.

If you don't understand it, us mere mortals are fucked.

Post by Richard Kettlewell

Post by Huge
The only way encrypted email will ever become ubiquitous is if
it is transparent, automatic and the default.

...which probably wouldn’t help anyway since AFAIK almot all real
attacks on email confidentiality don’t work by intercepting it in
transit, they work by credential theft (and while you can mitigate this
with separate credentials for key use, as PGP integrations usually do,
that would not be transparent).

Or social engineering, or simple mistakes by the users. One of the initial
solutions we tried required users to put the string "[Encrypt]" in the Subject
of their emails. They couldn't even manage that.

[Rich]

Post by Sylvia Else
Companies that provide contact forms on their websites, but either do
not monitor wherever those forms end up, or just don't reply to them.
On two occasions, I've tried to get information, without success, and
end up resorting to phoning them.

You are lucky you could even find a phone number. Way too many
"internet" businesses seem to actively discourage any contact by simply
not providing a phone number anywhere on their website.

And then, yes, the 'web form' flows off into the ether never to be seen
or heard from again.

[Sylvia Else]

Post by Rich

Post by Sylvia Else
Companies that provide contact forms on their websites, but either do
not monitor wherever those forms end up, or just don't reply to them.
On two occasions, I've tried to get information, without success, and
end up resorting to phoning them.

You are lucky you could even find a phone number. Way too many
"internet" businesses seem to actively discourage any contact by simply
not providing a phone number anywhere on their website.
And then, yes, the 'web form' flows off into the ether never to be seen
or heard from again.

Overall, it seems a strange way to do business.

Sylvia.

[Huge]

Post by Sylvia Else

Post by Rich

Post by Sylvia Else
Companies that provide contact forms on their websites, but either do
not monitor wherever those forms end up, or just don't reply to them.
On two occasions, I've tried to get information, without success, and
end up resorting to phoning them.

You are lucky you could even find a phone number. Way too many
"internet" businesses seem to actively discourage any contact by simply
not providing a phone number anywhere on their website.
And then, yes, the 'web form' flows off into the ether never to be seen
or heard from again.

Overall, it seems a strange way to do business.

That depends on your PoV. Answering random queries from the general
public is expensive. It may cost more than the amount of business it
generates, so why not stop doing it? This is the kind of thing that
happens when MBAs run your business.

[Rich]

Post by Sylvia Else

Post by Rich

Post by Sylvia Else
Companies that provide contact forms on their websites, but either
do not monitor wherever those forms end up, or just don't reply to
them.
On two occasions, I've tried to get information, without success,
and end up resorting to phoning them.

You are lucky you could even find a phone number. Way too many
"internet" businesses seem to actively discourage any contact by
simply not providing a phone number anywhere on their website.
And then, yes, the 'web form' flows off into the ether never to be
seen or heard from again.

Overall, it seems a strange way to do business.

No really, it is the 'side-show barker' model.

Roll into town, setup a booth, sell as much crapola as possible as fast
as possible, disappear.

With the exception that there's no physical travel involved for the
"barker" and they don't physically disappear, just virtually disappear
once you discover you want/need to make contact.

[Larry Sheldon]

Post by Sylvia Else
Companies that provide contact forms on their websites, but either do
not monitor wherever those forms end up, or just don't reply to them.
On two occasions, I've tried to get information, without success, and
end up resorting to phoning them.
Memo to businesses: If you don't want to handle web/email queries, don't
provide the option. That way, you won't annoy potential customers quite
so much.

Especially annoying are the many many cases I run into (being old and
lazy and a bit in firm and don't get out like used to) with credit card
in virtual hand, trying to buy something.

[Bob Eager]

Post by Sylvia Else
Companies that provide contact forms on their websites, but either do
not monitor wherever those forms end up, or just don't reply to them.
On two occasions, I've tried to get information, without success, and
end up resorting to phoning them.

I had that about 4 months ago. I didn't phone them - I went somewhere
else after a week. I still haven't had a response.

[Sylvia Else]

Post by Bob Eager

Post by Sylvia Else
Companies that provide contact forms on their websites, but either do
not monitor wherever those forms end up, or just don't reply to them.
On two occasions, I've tried to get information, without success, and
end up resorting to phoning them.

I had that about 4 months ago. I didn't phone them - I went somewhere
else after a week. I still haven't had a response.

Well, walking away is the preferred option, but unfortunately I've not
found an alternative source for either product.

Sylvia.

[Computer Nerd Kev]

Post by Sylvia Else
Companies that provide contact forms on their websites, but either do
not monitor wherever those forms end up, or just don't reply to them.
On two occasions, I've tried to get information, without success, and
end up resorting to phoning them.

Though that still leaves open to the old "I'll call you back". More times
than not that seems to mean: "your sale sounds like too much work, hopefully
after waiting for a day or two you'll call back and someone else can deal
with it". My dignity sometimes only barely restrains me from closing with
a plea "please do, won't you".

Post by Sylvia Else
Memo to businesses: If you don't want to handle web/email queries, don't
provide the option. That way, you won't annoy potential customers quite
so much.

With some of the small country businesses that I deal with I suspect that
the contact forms are set up by some local "web designer" (AKA template
editor) and the people you want to talk to don't really know about it.
Possibly, they don't even know "how to do the Emails".

Not that the forms for bigger businesses are much more hopeful.