Six Apart support emails

This would be sort of humorous if it wasn't so depressing.

I found a number of Typepad blogs which are simply shock full of spam.  It appears that the blog submission address has probably ended up on spammers' mailing lists, and so the spam goes directly to the blog.

Here's a Google search which demonstrates this.  It appears that these blogs are basically on autopilot, and only the spammers have been posting to them lately.

So I tried to contact Typepad support, which goes to the mothership, Six Apart.  I was too lazy to sign in and I wasn't reporting this as a paying customer of theirs anyway.  Well, that didn't turn out so good.  I have now received five substantially identical emails with basically no intelligent content at all.

Allow me to quote that in case the image isn't completely clear.

Recently you requested personal assistance from Six Apart Support.

Below is a summary of your request and our response.

Thank you for allowing us to be of service to you.

To respond to this message, please reply to this email and type your
reply between the lines in the space below. Text entered into any
other part of this message will be discarded.

[===> Please enter your reply below this line <===]

[===> Please enter your reply above this line <===]

There is no indication of what they are responding to (what if I had submitted multiple support requests?) and no indication of what sort of response they are soliciting, in spite of the phrase "below is a summary of your request and our response".  I replied with a question about what they need from me and what the status of the problem is, only to receive another one of these, etc.  Finally I just said forget it (to which I received the reply you see above).

So Melanie and Kymberlie, if you see this; hi, that's you in that picture.  (Sorry, couldn't resist.)

Seriously, I'm hoping their paid support is better.  (My experience is that it is.)

Comments

[era]

Update: Created a ticket as a paying customer, just for the hell of it.

[Melanie (TypePad Support)]

Hi, and we're so sorry about this! It looks like you were receiving blank emails instead of the replies that we were sending to you. I've updated your ticket, so you should have a thorough answer and explanation for the problem there. Thanks for letting us know that this was happening! We'll take a look into why the email replies to you were blank.

Please feel free to open a ticket like the one that you did at any time - we're happy to help.

[Roger Butterfield]

Looks like there's something weird going on at TypePad - my blog seems to have developed a mind of its own!

[era]

@Melanie:

Actually it looks like the emails are incorrectly encoded. The Content-Type says multipart/alternative and so my email client shows me the preferred alternative, which for me is the first part (the text part) and your actual replies are only visible in the HTML parts which follow.

Your responder should use "Content-type: multipart/related" or simply be redesigned to better conform to email standards (I have never seen anything like this attempted before).

Or, as a really minimal alternative, add the text "Our response is attached below; you will need a HTML-capable email client to view it" to the first text part -- actually that would already have cleared this up for me quite well.

(Also submitted the above as a response to the support ticket I had opened, where Melanie explained all of this. I see now that the earlier exchange by email was a failure to communicate properly from my side as well -- their automation apparently stripped away the quoted parts which were significant for understanding the problem.)

[era]

@Roger B.: Not really clear what you are referring to, care to explain?