[jmar]

Hello,

I saw nick posting quite frequently on this board so I figured I would try here. I have attempted to reach sales by email 3 times over 3 weeks, and phone twice with no luck. I wanted to send you a pm about this but they are disabled on this board. I was interested in your product but wanted to chat about some of my companies requirements and get to know the company we would be depending on for our encoding. Nick could you or somebody at ioncube contact me via my email listed on my forum profile?

Thanks.

[liaison]

Hi

Thanks for letting me know. I've looked into this and it seems that all 3 were caught as false positive spam. We receive well over 1000 spams a day, most of which are caught so that they don't cause a nuisance, but spam checking isn't an exact science and it can pickup good emails. Part of our procedures are to also run manual scans of caught spam each day, and this generally picks up any false positives, but unfortunately this isn't infallible. Why your emails were caught isn't clear, but the spam system is always retrained when good emails were wrongly identified, and whilst 3 of your emails were picked up, it's a statistically rare occurrence.

The potential for lost emails is why we use a ticket system for the support helpdesk, as even if a customer's own email doesn't work (which happens more than it should) or we lose an email, the web based ticket is always there. The ticket system can be used for any queries although it's primarily support oriented, and sales queries have always historically been handled via email, although this may be moved to the ticket system too.

Unlike most companies we generally work for some periods on weekends too, so there can be responses on weekends where necessary, and no "please allow 72 hours for a response at weekends" that one gets from some companies. I'll look into your emails myself.

For the telephone I've verified this morning that the US numbers and UK numbers are working, and you should receive a "Welcome to ionCube" message and then various options after that dependent on the time of day and week. Being a UK company we have centralised operations in the UK, and the US numbers route here. Our timezone is currently BST, which is GMT(UTC) + 1, and we answer during normal business hours; outside of that time you should still be able to leave a message, and if this is intelligible then we would respond if required. As one might expect, we are heavy adopters of technology, and we make use of SIP based PSTN-VoIP-PSTN systems for telephony and the latest DECT PSTN/IP telephones. In our experience this has been highly successful, but again there can be glitches although this appears to be rare with good voice quality, no dropped calls and high availability. If you did receive a seemingly dead line or number unavailable then please let us know as we're reliant on 3rd parties and we aim to keep track of any such problems.
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[jmar]

Hello,

I got your reply today Nick, Thanks. The lines were not dead, we just always went to voicemail. And after 3 weeks of missed emails, decided not to leave them. So the systems you have in place for phone are fine.

Yeah the sales ticket system seems like a good idea, although a simple "reply to verify this email" might work for sales too. Filtering sales never a good idea

[liaison]

Hi

Glad you got the email. If the potatoes went to voicemail then it's most likely that you were unwittingly calling out of hours or all lines were busy.

Having spam checking on all emails is unfortunately essential as the volume of spam is so huge. If we didn't then the spam might cause more problems for genuine emails than without it as finding good emails would then be like finding a needle in the proverbial haystack.

The "this address requires verification" or "reply to this email to confirm" approach on emails may work, but it can also be annoying for end users who may ignore the reply, or where the response may itself go into their spam. Spam emails would also generate challenge emails, resulting either in unexpected emails to people whose email addresses had been used without their knowing, or a large backlog of emails that our email system keeps trying to send to addresses that will never work. So there's no perfect solution, but we're reachable in many ways so even if email does fail, we should be reachable by another way.
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