On Fri, 02 May 2014 13:57:13 -0500, dpb wrote:

On 5/2/2014 12:27 PM, KenK wrote:
In my experience email is losing its effectiveness. For example, twice this
past week my email to a company with a question/problem was ignored ...

Direct e-mail or thru a web "Contact us" link?

My stockbroker has his own personal Contact Me link, on the brokerage
webpage.. I suspect most brokers do.

But when I use that, they have control over the email. If they delete
my incoming email, I have no record that I sent one.

So I email him directly, with an brokerage address he gave me. So far,
he hasn't ignored me. But I can't help asking myself what the
upside of using the Contact Me link would be. And what all the
downsides of writing driectrly are.


Well, if there's a dispute and I've written to Contact Me, his boss,
everyone who outranks him, will know what I wrote and when, and there
will be no question that I did write. OTOH, I'd be glad to show them
my outgoing email, and also, they know -- I'm sure they keep a copy of
-- what comes in on his direct brokerage email address. OT3H, I could
address my direct email to an invalid address, and then go back with a
harddrive editor and change the address to his, or change the date to
one that makes me look good... Before I print it out.


I'm not terribly
surprised at an outside email from an unknown domain; I'd be more so if
it were from their own source/link.

Then again, depending on the size of the company and the nature of the
question, I could see response time varying greatly all the way to the
bit-bucket for trivial stuff. I _would_ however, expect an automated
mailer response at a minimum from that route.