Barnes and Noble SMTP Follies

By Deane Barker • •
AI Summary

This post explores the author’s frustrating experience with Barnes & Noble’s SMTP service, detailing issues with email delivery and customer support. The author highlights challenges faced while trying to resolve these technical problems, emphasizing the complexity and inefficiencies encountered.

An order from BarnesAndNoble.com wasn’t delivered after 10 days, so yesterday I went to their site to find out why. I found a customer service form, and submitted it with my name, email, order number, etc. I got a confirmation page saying that the issue had been logged.

Then, today, I get this:

This is an automatically generated Delivery Status Notification. THIS IS A WARNING MESSAGE ONLY. YOU DO NOT NEED TO RESEND YOUR MESSAGE. Delivery to the following recipients has been delayed. service@barnesandnoble.com

Could it really be that a company as big as Barnes and Noble is depending on SMTP email for something as critical as their customer service system?

This notice tells me that the form just generated an SMTP email that was sent to that customer service address. Indeed, the email it generated was attached – it was my form data with User-Agent and IP tacked on (it looked suspiciously like a FrontPage WebBot email, actually).

Was it logged in a database? A CRM system? Doesn’t seem like it. It seems like Barnes and Noble honestly just dumps the form data to an email, tosses it at an SMTP server, and crosses its fingers.

Email is a fundamentally untrustworthy mechanism these days. For smaller companies and non-critical information, it’s fine. But for a Fortune 500 company to run a CRM-type application off it seems awfully risky to me, as evidenced here.

Links to this – Email Forms: Slient and Deadly January 11, 2006
I really hate email forms, from a developer perspective. Meaning, I hate forms that just email something somewhere and then forget about it. The fact is that email is a horrifically dodgy medium to do anything with. Two-and-a-half years ago, I complained about Barnes and Noble doing this. A...