Hotmail's Itchy Anti-Spam Trigger Finger

from the stamping-out-spammers-and-non-spammers-alike-with-reckless-abandon dept

I think many of us have come across customer service bots that respond to email with boilerplate responses that don't answer our questions in the slightest. Here's an amusing story of such things happening at Hotmail. Some guy had his account cancelled as a spammer for no good reason. Actually, what happened was the recipient of a message from the hotmail user bounced it back to the user and to abuse@hotmail.com telling them he didn't like Hotmail's practices, and didn't want to deal with them. Hotmail's crack anti-spam staff - instead of actually reading the message - assumed the original was spam, and cut the guy off. Multiple emails to Hotmail to resolve the situation resulted in boilerplate emails that said over and over that the guy had violated the terms of service and they couldn't do anything for him. Welcome to Hotmail's customer disservice group...