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.
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)
AWeber’s response.
AWeber’s response fixed the issue but not my curiosity.
AWeber asked for the form where the issue occurred.
I responded, along with an observation and the link to the page where issue occurred.
I chuckled reading AWeber’s response 🙂 …
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?
I think it’s a bug. No one should tell my name is not admitted and no one should impose me to use a different email address if my address is correct. In this case I would feel offended.
I live this problem every day because my last name has an apostrophe.
Very often when I fill up a web form I get “bad email address”, “invalid character” or language specific exceptions of any kind. It’s very annoying.
@Gianni: That’s a good point you raised. There is a strong need of a industry wide standard for such cases. Apostrophe’s are common in European names.
Really a good read. I think its a feature and not a bug, the system is smart enough to detect words that might sound abusive / offensive. But this condition can always be handled by explicitly creating a rule for such names. or we can always manually add them upon requesting