Thoughts on Support Email

Almost everyone receives email support from various web sites and companies. The problem with all of these different companies is that the name associated with the email is almost always Support. This includes various forums, message boards and blogs. When recieving emails from all of these different entitites it is usually difficult to determine which company/web site sent the email until opening it.

For the end user, that’s me, this is confusing and a potential waste of time. Different forums and support emails have different priorities for me. I know that I can set up email filters and have done so for many of them - Gmail is awesome because it also allows you to color tag as part of a filter. But this still relies on the end user setting up a filter, which is not the ideal situation.

I suggest that companiess and message boards set the from name to something a little more meaningful than merely support. For example all support email from my hosting company Site5 are prefixed with Site5, for example Site5 billing, Site5 support. But forum emails from ExpressionEngine come with the incredibly descritive name of “Support” other names from emails I’ve recieved are Sales & EllisLab. Unless one knows that EllisLab is the parent company of ExpressionEngine that name is not going to be very helpful.

I could go into countless other examples of bad email sender names. Generic names such as Sales and Support should be prefixed with something more meaningful like the name of the Company.

Practice what I Preach

I’m trying to find the settings that set the name for comment notification in ExpressionEngine to check what I have set, but can’t find it. Once I do, I’ll be sure to have a descriptive name in the sender field.

Tags: email, support,