I’m working with a company that uses Lotus Notes. It’s been more than 10 years since I’ve had to use Notes and it’s as bad as ever. It’s probably the worst piece of software ever released by a major company.

The worst feature — well, it’s hard to pick a worst feature, but one of the worst features — because I have to deal with it dozens of times a day — is the way Notes makes me reply to email. I can’t just click Reply and start typing. When I click Reply, I get a dropdown list of options and have to select one:

- Reply
- Reply with History
- Reply without Attachment(s)
- Reply with Internet-Style History

The godawful thing about this is that default options for email work 100 percent of the time. I always want to reply with history and without attachments, so why give me a bunch of options that I don’t want and make me explicitly select one every time?

Why would I not want to reply with history? If I’m sending replies without including the original email for context, most people send and get way too much email to remember what the heck I’m responding to.

And why would I send an attachment back to someone with my reply? They already have the document. They sent it to me. They don’t need another copy of it. But every day I see emails going back and forth across the network with multi-megabyte attachments because people have to explicitly select an option to remove it.

I got an email today with the subject line

i’ve had eonugh of your bluslhit

This should be great!, I thought. I don’t know what I’ve done, but some illiterate has had enough of it and is now going to settle my hash!

Imagine my disappointment when it turned out to be just another ad for online pharmaceuticals . . .

On this date in 1994, a message was posted to some Usenet newsgroups by the law firm of Canter and Siegel, advertising its services for the Green Card lottery.

Others soon followed in the footsteps of Canter and Siegel, torpedoing the usefulness of newsgroups with junk messages, which eventually spread from Usenet to email.

According to Brightmail, most email is now spam.

I get about 200 emails a day — 90 percent junk — and 90 percent of the junk is targeted at human weakness, weariness, disappointment, regret and self-loathing.

Continue reading Prescription Drugs by Email!

Today’s email brings the following inquiry:

Would you like a larger penis? Or for your spouse to have a larger one?

Hmmm . . . neither, actually.

This is a story about customer satisfaction in the Internet age.

Today’s Good Morning Silicon Valley brings this provocative item:

Problems with Webvan? Mercury News reporter Joelle Tessler would like to talk to former Webvan customers dissatisfied with the company’s service. If that’s you, please drop her an e-mail at jtessler@sjmercury.com

Is this for real?! Well, there’s one way to find out . . .

From: Paul Epps
Sent: Thursday, September 20, 2001 2:35 PM
To: jtessler@sjmercury.com
Subject: webvan

Are you preparing an article on dissatisfied Webvan customers? How do you know they’re dissatisfied before you’ve talked to them? Who can the *satisfied* Webvan customers talk to? I’m in no way affiliated with Webvan, nor was I a customer, but this doesn’t seem fair.

Apologies in advance if I’ve misread your intentions.

From: Tessler, Joelle
Sent: Thursday, September 20, 2001 2:39 PM
To: Paul Epps
Subject: RE: webvan

I have been working on a story about Webvan for about 6-7 weeks now (have spoken with more than 40 people who worked there) and I am learning that they had some pretty serious problems in the Oakland warehouse. Because it was so highly automated, things would break and everything would come to a halt. I keep hearing about orders that never made it out the door, orders that were hours late or cancelled altogether, orders in which half the totes were missing and so on. This is all coming from the couriers, customer service representatives, warehouse workers, etc. But just about every customer I have ever spoken to loved Webvan and I can’t figure it out… If I can’t find dissatisfied customers, I will say that in the story.

From: Paul Epps
Sent: Thursday, September 20, 2001 2:54 PM
To: Tessler, Joelle
Subject: RE: webvan

Wow, what a quick response! Here’s a theory for you: It doesn’t take perfection to satisfy people where Web technology is concerned. They still have such low expectations that they’re amazed when it works at all.

From: Tessler, Joelle
Sent: Thursday, September 20, 2001 3:11 PM
To: Paul Epps
Subject: RE: webvan

Well, some of that was cut and pasted since I’ve had to explain this over and over… You’re probably right. A lot of customers have written back to say they did have some problems, but still loved the service.