Turning away customers

That’s nice. I found a problem on Major League Baseball’s Web site and sent their general-contact email address a short message detailing the problem and gave them a solution. My email was immediately returned to me.

Hi. This is the qmail-send program at mail1.chek.com.
I’m afraid I wasn’t able to deliver your message to the following addresses. This is a permanent error; I’ve given up. Sorry it didn’t work out.

fanfeedbackreply@website.mlb.com:

Sorry, your intended recipient has too much mail stored in their mailbox. Your message totalled 2314 bytes, which would bring them over quota. However a smaller message might go through should you wish to inform the person you tried to email.

There’s so much wrong with this that I don’t even know where to start.

• You provide an address for people to contact you for help and that address is broken (of all the addresses to put a quota on, this wouldn’t be it).
• When an error occurs, you send a message back to them that’s filled with tech-speak.
• You offer a solution that is technical enough that most people won’t be able to figure out. (Go ask your dad how many words would fit into 2314 bytes.)
• The response message has spelling and grammatical errors. (Totalled should be totaled and however needs a comma after it.)
• The fact that your mailbox is full in the first place indicates that you don’t check it very often.

Go grab a pen and write this down. If a customer is going to go to the trouble of contacting you, it’s important, at least to them. Make sure you’ll see it.