Here is Trinic’s response to my castigation for sending me what I took to be an insulting email:

Peter,

We have a very extensive e-mail system to handle our e-mails to ensure no single e-mail is ever lost or not responded to. Subsequently, it is inefficient for multiple departments to be responding to an identical inquiry. Whenever we receive identical messages at multiple e-mail addresses, we place the first paragraph you are inquiring about into our response.

Please also note that you were indeed in violation of our General Service Agreement. Section 5 of our General Service Agreement states:

“Please be aware that we have a strict policy on duplicate inquiries. If you submit an inquiry to us, please do so only once so we are able to respond in a timely fashion to your inquiry. Multiple inquiries slow down our efficiency and response time. If multiple inquiries are submitted regarding the same issue, your account and Services will be subject to termination.”

You may review the agreement in its entirety at:

http://www.trinic.com/legal/general.shtml

This agreement is bound to every customer whenever they register, transfer, renew, or purchase any service offered through us.

For future reference, if you are unsure which e-mail address to utilize when submitting our inquiry to us, please use the ‘General Inquiries’ e-mail address listed on our ‘Contact Us’ page which is ‘trinic@trinic.com’.

Sincerely,
Customer Relations
Trinic

Dear Trinic,

Thank you for your quick reply.

I certainly appreciate the need for you to maintain an effective email reply system; I know only too well how difficult it can be to deal with hundreds of incoming email messages on variety of topics.

I’ve no problem whatsoever with the spirit of this system. My only criticism is with the tone of your original message: you chewed me out, and that’s not, as a customer, something I see as a Good Thing. There are plenty of ways you could have asked me to refrain from doing what I did that would have been fair, reasonable, and had the desired effect.

In other words, it’s not your intent, your General Service Agreement or your technical services policy I have issue with, it’s simply your tone. Life is stressful enough without being castigated by your domain name registrar.

Here how I would suggest you approach this issue in future when emailing customers who do like I did:

Dear Peter,

Thank you for your inquiry about the CGI Timeout issue.

Before addressing this issue, I’d just like to point out that you sent your email to both customer service and technical support here at Trinic, and we’d ask that you refrain from doing this in future. We get a lot of email here at Trinic, and trying to make sure it gets to the right person is confusing enough without duplication like this! If you’re uncertain about which addresses to send email, just use the general trinic@trinic.com email address.

…and so on. I think you’ll agree that my version of the text contains the same content, but is slightly less heavy on the “you have sinned” tone.

Regards,
Peter