[Sigia-l] Re: SIGIA-L: Most abusive user experience?

[lee.r.sachs at verizon.com]

Lyle -

All good points and you I agree, there are reasonable justifications for
the automated response, especially when there's a value-added feature like
new information, tracking numbers, status.  But let's face it, it's a
machine writing back and that's not necessarily good service, unless it's
got new information, some value add.  I guess there were a few incidents
that struck me recently as so obviously neophyte e-commerce ventures
seeming to have been coached to "send the auto-response email" with no
benefit beyond cluttering my mailbox.

>An auto-response is a small bit
>of "system status" back to the user.

Yes, but again, how necessary is this or are we just doing this because we
can make the machines do this??  Is this like making tags blink if only
because we can make them blink, not because there's any clear benefit?

-lee