Idle State

Funny thing. Last week I sent email to Qatar Airways asking them to remove me from their email marketing. I've tried clicking on the link at the bottom of the spam <cough> I mean, marketing emails approximately 10 times over the last two months, but they still keep sending me the rubbish. The emails are typical marketing guff - stuff which I prefer not to receive. For example, Qatar Airways wrote a lovely email to me explaining that they will be to flying to New York from July 2007. Unfortunately, they are actually flying to Newark Liberty and not JFK or La Guardia. So - not really New York. Granted - It's close. And, hey, geographical accuracy isn't that important when you're running an airline, is it? Anyhow - I received the response below. Just to be sure it wasn't actually my problem, I emailed on more than one occasion from a few different email addresses - to ensure that this wasn't an incorrectly reported transient failure, due to, say, Sorbs et al. On checking, there was no listing for my IP address with any of the black listing sites. So, it seems they've mis-configured their exchange(? - I think the state 13 message is courtesy of exchange) server so it is not recognising externally originated mail for either their own domain (less likely) or for websupport@qatarairways.com (more likely). That's pretty fundamental stuff to get wrong. Configuring a mail server correctly nowdays is not rocket science. It's run-of-the-mill work that most of us can do while sleeping. So really - there is no excuse at all for getting it wrong. Unless of course, for appearances, you wanted to make it look like you are happy to accept comments via an email address but in actual fact, you don't really want the bother. This begs the question - if they can't carry out something simple like configuring their mail servers properly, how well are they doing something complex like maintaining their core business equipment?

-------- Original Message --------
Subject:     Delivery Status Notification (Failure)
Date:     Tue, 03 Jul 2007 13:02:25 -0700 (PDT)
From:     Mail Delivery Subsystem 
To:     xxxx@gmail.com

This is an automatically generated Delivery Status Notification

Delivery to the following recipient failed permanently:

     websupport@qatarairways.com

Technical details of permanent failure: PERM_FAILURE: SMTP Error (state 13): 550 Relaying denied to 

   ----- Original message -----

Received: by 10.140.186.18 with SMTP id j18mr1817170rvf.1183492940782;
        Tue, 03 Jul 2007 13:02:20 -0700 (PDT)
Return-Path: 
Received: from 
        by mx.google.com with ESMTP id k34sm18206973rvb.2007.07.03.13.02.12
        (version=TLSv1/SSLv3 cipher=RC4-MD5);
        Tue, 03 Jul 2007 13:02:14 -0700 (PDT)
Message-ID: <468AAB35.9050001@gmail.com>
Disposition-Notification-To: Campbell M 
Date: Tue, 03 Jul 2007 23:01:57 +0300
From: Campbell M 
User-Agent: Thunderbird 2.0.0.4 (Macintosh/20070604)
MIME-Version: 1.0
To:  websupport@qatarairways.com
Subject: Remove my email address from your marketing lists immediately.
X-Priority: 1 (Highest)
Content-Type: multipart/alternative;

yada yada yada.

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