A while ago I talked about introducing an affiliates programme for TopDesk. It didn’t end up happening then for a number of reasons, but as of the 1.4 release I’m of the opinion that TopDesk is mature enough to make affilate sales viable, so you can now sign up for the TopDesk affiliate program.

The plan is to start off with a small number of affiliates and see how it goes. If we don’t run into any problems then the programme will be expanded to accommodate more people.

One of our customers* is currently having a problem receiving emails from us, and since a few others have had the same problem in the past, I though I’d post about it so everyone’s aware of the issue.

The problem is that we’re getting orders from spam filtered email addresses so every time we try and send them something, it bounces. As far as the ordering process is concerned, this means that Plimus can’t send a user order confirmation or receipt emails, and, more importantly, we can’t send them a download link to the full version of TopDesk. Even worse, when the customer emails us to tell us that they didn’t receive anything, any replies we send back also bounce. I’d hate to think what their opinion of Otaku Software is at that point.

This is a huge problem as far as I’m concerned, as there’s probably nothing more annoying than buying something and then not being able to get your hands on it straight away. It’s extremely frustrating for a customer, as they may not realize the spam filter is the cause of the problem, and it’s very frustrating for us, as we have an unhappy customer that we can’t communicate with. In the past we’ve been lucky enough to eventually get through to the customers and sort everything out, but obviously I’d rather prevent the situation happening at all.

At the moment, there’s a notice (in bright red) at the top of the order page asking customers not to use a spam filtered email address, but it doesn’t seem to be working (I’ve skipped over the same kind of things on online order forms myself, so I can see how easy it’d be to miss it), so I’m open to suggestions about how to reduce the problem and make customers more aware of the issue. One idea I had was to encourage users concerned about spam to use a free email account address (Yahoo, Hotmail, etc..) when ordering, but that’s way too much work on the customers part for my liking, and Plimus, our payment gateway, isn’t a big fan of those types of accounts. Does anyone have any other ideas?

* While I don’t want to post any personal details about the customer I’d still like get a message out to them, so to Steve from Canada: can you please either add us to your no-spam list and let us know, or send us a non-spam filtered email address we can reach you at?