subdomain delegation for email routing

Fri Sep 26 09:16:37 PDT 2003

Of the techie answers mentioned already I favor Alvin's approach for
simplicity.  You don't need a whole subdomain for one address, and it's
not terribly wise to give the third party control of a piece of your
domain beyond that.

However, the vague description sounds like it has both techie and social 
aspects to solve...

> The true nature of the problem that must be solved is not clear from your 
> email.  The response time appears to be the problem. 

What I got out of it is that humans are accepting mail at company1 then
forwarding it to outsourced-clues.com or whoever, so the time for the
final note to reach the customer is lengthened by one more factor of human
interaction.

In such a case though it's worth checking if the human at step 1 is
performing an important screening function.  My first guess is the brass
would say no and the real answer's yes, since it's your only real way to
tell when the customer came by.  But if there would *ever* be a reason
that they would *not* pass along the mail to outsourced-clues, then the
function is in fact a critical part of the process.  It doesn't mean
technology can't help out, though.

> It is unclear to me 
> how changing the email path fixes that from the information given.  And who 
> is it a problem for?  company1.com?  If the email does not get to 
> company1.com first, then how will company1.com know how slow webservice.com 
> is in forwarding the emails appropriately?

What's especially vague is whether the declared "response time" is time
from customer send to customer getting their first reply, or to customer
getting their question settled.

When I worked at McAfee, tech support was painfully aware that customer
expectation varied widely about what response time *should* be (I
emailed you guys a whole 10 minutes ago! Don't you know the internet's
supposed to be fast?), never mind that some questions are easy and 
some aren't.  Also the customers rarely could get it right whether their 
emailed question belonged in customer care or tech supp anyway - or had 
aspects of both.  Getting the wrong dept delayed their initial response.

What I did was slip a reply bot into the stream which, unlike the usual
autoreply bot, passed the message on through - with some footnotes.
Also, the reply wasn't static - it was put together from a few parts;
a friendly intro, some were short randomized FAQs.  If it spotted useful
keywords then the FAQ would be not-quite-so-random.  Cap off with how to 
reach the staff if your email dies on you or other disaster befalls 
before (reasonable time to reply).  Season with some antispam and 
anti-abuse measures.  Bake at 250 for 20 minutes, remove, let cool, 
frost, serves thousands. :)

In your case you could add tracking information, for instance log an
email ID for it and add that into the subject on the way to your outside
care staff, as well as into the customer's initial reply.  If a customer 
who's been flaked on calls in, they have something to give you, and your 
local flamewarden has something to look up to find out where it went awry.

Of course this is the moment for the obligatory plug for my consulting
services :D but probably most of BayLISA can do this sort of thing.

  . | .   Heather Stern                  |         star at starshine.org
--->*<--- Starshine Technical Services - * - consulting at starshine.org
  ' | `   Sysadmin Support and Training  |        (800) 938-4078