At Nothing New Press, we answer every e-mail we receive from our customers. We do occasionally receive a complaint from a customer, who has not received an reply in their inbox, that we are ignoring their e-mail. But that is simply not the case; we always write replies, but not every reply is delivered. Sometimes we have our reply e-mails returned to us for delivery failure, but the e-mails are always replied to. If you are waiting on a reply from Nothing New Press, there are a few things you can check:
Do you have a spam filter? Check your spam folder for our reply. Since we are a business, and the information in our e-mails are about products, some spam filters automatically block our e-mails.
Set your spam filter to always accept e-mails from the nothingnewpress.com domain. We do not send out newsletters or even new product announcements to our customers (we probably should do that). You won’t get junk mail from us. The problem is, I am not a web technician or Internet specialist. I don’t know how to tell my e-mail program to send out mass letters, so we don’t do that. We write to you if you have written to us first, or if you provided your e-mail address with a book order for us to e-mail you the tracking number when it ships.
Make sure your e-mail address that you provide for us is current, and it is one you check regularly. This might seem silly, but this has been the problem with miscommunication in a few instances before. Someone might be surfing from a friend’s house or have followed a link in an e-mail account they don’t check often to the Nothing New Press site. There is no way for us to know what your primary e-mail address is. We reply to the e-mail address we are given, and that is the only information we have.
Include your phone number with your e-mail or your order. That way we can still reach you and answer your question if your e-mails are being returned to us for some reason.
Our server has been down before in the past. A couple of times it was when malicious indivduals “hacked” our website or server to prevent the operation of business. Sometimes it doesn’t even have anything to do with us; it can be a system problem at our server headquarters in the Pacific Northwest (although now we have redundant servers in other places – Texas is one I think – to prevent interruption in case of a power failure or something in one place).
In two instances we have had other servers mass refuse any e-mail from our server. This was because another company – not Nothing New Press – was using space purchased at the same server where we have our space to send out spam to everyone. This is called e-mail abuse, and your server will block every e-mail from our server, even if our server hosts 200 companies (one of which is Nothing New Press) and only 1 of them is responsible for the spam. As soon as the server people become aware of the problem, they cut off server service to the offending company, and have to ping all the other servers that is okay to start accepting e-mail from that server again. This process usually takes 24 hours from the time the abuse is discovered, but we have had several days, to weeks, of getting confusing e-mails from people (Why aren’t you answering me?) before we have figured out the problem. The first time this happened, our e-mails were blocked for weeks, I think it was in December. I don’t even know when it started, because we don’t always get notified when an e-mail of ours is dumped instead of delivered. After a few weeks of us getting “Why aren’t you answering me” e-mails from people, and not understanding the problem, because the reply e-mails were sitting right in our sent folder, our server people finally figured out what was going on. Now we have a policy that at the first sign of a returned e-mail notice, we notify our server people immediately, so they can begin an investigation on their end and stop the blocked e-mails before too much time has gone by. But the solution here, too, is to include your phone number with your e-mail, so that we can call if all else fails. We have not ever sold customer information to anyone, nor will we ever.
But we ALWAYS answer e-mails. 🙂
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