bloody CTC

Ian Smith wrote:
On Thu, 7 Jun 2007 00:34:59 +0100, Andy Key wrote:

If you are unable to read the format of an email the CTC has sent you,
by all means ask the sender to provide it in a different format. If you
can't read it because of some disability or other, you are doubly (nay,
triply) justified in asking. But bear in mind that the format you're
complaining about will be readable by almost EVERY other person on the
mailing list.

You are talking ********. I guarantee that not one person the message
was sent to could read it. 100% failure rate.

It wasn't a mailing list post - it was an email from one CTC bod to me
alone - one CTC member. Sent with no plain text translation and no
indication what the .doc file contained. No way whatsoever to
distinguish it from any number of viral infections (in fact, it was
rather less convincing than many virus attempts).

I've never had any replies to my few emails to the CTC over the last
few years. It occurs to me that if they sent me nothing but an
attached Word doc their email would probably have been diverted by the
university's spam filters into my spam bucket, since that kind of
cluelessness is characteristic of spam. I'm supposed to check
carefully that the spam bucket contains only spam before emptying it,
but when it only contains 99.9% spam you get a bit careless :-)

--
Chris Malcolm DoD #205
IPAB, Informatics, JCMB, King's Buildings, Edinburgh, EH9 3JZ, UK
[http://www.dai.ed.ac.uk/homes/cam/]

On Sun, 10 Jun, Chris Malcolm wrote:
Ian Smith wrote:

It wasn't a mailing list post - it was an email from one CTC bod to me
alone - one CTC member. Sent with no plain text translation and no
indication what the .doc file contained. No way whatsoever to
distinguish it from any number of viral infections (in fact, it was
rather less convincing than many virus attempts).

I've never had any replies to my few emails to the CTC over the last
few years. It occurs to me that if they sent me nothing but an
attached Word doc their email would probably have been diverted by the
university's spam filters into my spam bucket,

Actually, it seems as if their 'do not email' preference over-rides
everything else. They say I was not getting newsnet because I'd said
I didn't want to be emailed (I don't know when I said that, quite
possibly I did some time in the past). I would have thought that
their systems would be set up so that someone actively requesting
newsnet would over-ride the general 'do-not-email' setting, but maybe
not. Given that, it would not surprise me to find that their
'do-not-email' setting is deemed to over-ride responding to people
too.

I'm supposed to check carefully that the spam bucket contains only
spam before emptying it, but when it only contains 99.9% spam you
get a bit careless :-)

I never used to check - my main work account gets about 1200 spam
attempts a week (our current worst email address gets about 2000 spam
a week) and life is too short. However, putting greylisting on the
server has been miraculous - I'm down to about 3 a day getting through
greylisting and into the spam bucket, about 5 or 6 a day avoiding both
filter systems. Minor problems with a badly set up relay in Hong Kong
(makes one delivery attempt, waits 36 hours to do the second) but
otherwise no detected false positives and better performance than
anything else we've done.

regards, Ian SMith
--
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|o o|
|/ \|

Chris Malcolm wrote on 10/06/2007 19:13:

I've never had any replies to my few emails to the CTC over the last
few years.

Now you come to mention it... I contacted my MP about the bikes on
trains thing and they asked for us to copy the letter sent, and any
replies, to a contact at CTC.

I got quite a good reply back from my MP (Beverley Hughes) and a letter
via her from someone in the Transport dept. I pdfed it and duly
forwarded it to the CTC contact, explicitly asking for an
acknowledgement (since I'd not heard the time before when I copied them
my original communication).

I still haven't heard anything.

I thought they were just being rude... perhaps not.

Peter

--
http://www.scandrett.net/lx/
http://www.scandrett.net/bike/

Peter Scandrett wrote on 11/06/2007 09:47 +0100:
Chris Malcolm wrote on 10/06/2007 19:13:

I've never had any replies to my few emails to the CTC over the last
few years.

Now you come to mention it... I contacted my MP about the bikes on
trains thing and they asked for us to copy the letter sent, and any
replies, to a contact at CTC.

I got quite a good reply back from my MP (Beverley Hughes) and a letter
via her from someone in the Transport dept. I pdfed it and duly
forwarded it to the CTC contact, explicitly asking for an
acknowledgement (since I'd not heard the time before when I copied them
my original communication).

I still haven't heard anything.

I thought they were just being rude... perhaps not.


They have quite a small staff at the CTC and I suspect its a choice of
either spending time replying to each communication or doing something
about the subject of the communication or putting up membership fees to
employ more staff. Which would you prefer they did?


--
Tony

"The most savage controversies are those about matters as to which there
is no good evidence either way."
- Bertrand Russell

Tony Raven wrote on 11/06/2007 10:20:
They have quite a small staff at the CTC and I suspect its a choice of
either spending time replying to each communication or doing something
about the subject of the communication or putting up membership fees to
employ more staff. Which would you prefer they did?

Not sure. I didn't really want a full letter but a quick acknowledgement
wouldn't have gone amiss, particularly when they solicited emails on
this matter. I'm one of those people who values good customer service
and communication and if the price has to go up to cover that then so be
it. I work for a charity and if we just ignored our supporters I suspect
we'd go under pretty quickly.

I'm a new(ish) member of the CTC and somewhat taken aback by the number
of negative comments made in this ng about them. It seems to me that
they are doing a good job defending cycling issues, particularly in
light of recent events (Highway Code, Cadden, Rhyll) and we should be
grateful for that...

Peter

--
http://www.scandrett.net/lx/
http://www.scandrett.net/bike/