For the past several years, the team at LearnQTP has been using AWeber as the reliable email marketing system of choice.  AWeber (along with Feedburner) helps us in managing 50,000+ email subscribers and also ensures that our emails end up in our reader’s inboxes and not their spam boxes.

This morning I woke up to a peculiar comment from a blog reader on LearnQTP.

email-issue

I am unable to subscribe for free questions and syllabus details. Says – “this email cannot be added”
Please revert to this for smooth flow of conversation.

We have never seen or heard such an issue earlier. Intrigued, I tried entering the email myself and yes it failed to enter in the subscription form. I even tried entering the given email from the AWeber backend, while it did show the success message but it never got added to the AWeber’s email database. This quirky behavior peaked my curiosity and I shot an email to AWeber support.

The conversation followed. (Names, emails, and pictures of AWeber support reps in the conversation have been blurred to protect privacy)

1st-email-learnqtp-aweber

AWeber’s response.

2nd-email-learnqtp-aweber

AWeber’s response fixed the issue but not my curiosity.

3rd-email-learnqtp-aweber

AWeber asked for the form where the issue occurred.

4th-email-learnqtp-aweber

I responded, along with an observation and the link to the page where issue occurred.

5th-email-learnqtp-aweber

I chuckled reading AWeber’s response 🙂 …

6th-email-learnqtp-aweber

While on one hand, AWeber is right on their part to block any potentially abusive words from their system; on the other hand, I believe emails are something which should never be processed by such rules. In a country like India, names with such a word embedded inside are commonplace – Dikshit, Rakshit, Arukshita etc.

What do you think? Is it a bug or a does it qualify to be a feature?