[Sigia-l] Forcing use of Web pages instead of email

[MJJAIXEN at up.com]

I made the decision three years ago to remove e-mail addresses on our site
and replace them with a web form.  Your point about saving a inquiry is a
valid downside of this process; however, there are several reasons why we
implemented this that give us far greater benefits:

(a) SPAM - while we have spam filters in place, they are not perfect and
spammers are getting more and more aggressive and creative in their
attempts to subvert them.  A new recent trend is that spammers are learning
to use these web forms, though.
(b) message context - Users would send us very cryptic messages such as
"Help" or "I don't understand" and we would have absolutely no idea what
they are talking about.  Our web form tracks the referer (yes, that can get
subverted as well) page and browser information which helps us to put the
message into context.
(c) Wireless and roaming users - Many people are now using web based e-mail
(gmail, Yahoo!, etc.) and mailto: links don't work.  Yes, I could do a cut
and paste, but a link to an e-mail form is much easier to use.  (I'm
reminded of this every time I help my retired parents use their computer.)

In our case, our responses are returned to the user via e-mail rather than
through another web page so any back-and-forth continues through e-mail and
not the web.  But I understand that banks and other institutions don't find
e-mail secure enough.  (And while tools such as PGP can theoretically make
e-mail secure, I've generally found them to be way too cumbersome for the
average user to set up.)

Leonard Will <L.Will at willpowerinfo.co.uk> wrote
> 1. I cannot easily keep a copy of what I have said in my normal database
> of email messages, and it is therefore difficult to follow up with a
> thread of messages if an initial response is not received or does not
> completely resolve the issue. Sometimes companies make my outgoing
> messages available for me to read on their Web site, but not always, and
> they never tell me in advance whether they are going to do this.
>