eFax Hell? 71
RH Wesson asks: "We use eFax to distribute a 3 page fax once a week to about 75 customers of ours. Yesterday we uploaded a postscript version of our 3 page fax instead of the usual PDF version using the eFax Manager on Windows. We started getting calls from our customers about a 300+ page fax of garbage (it was really postscript source) We spent hours with eFax requesting them to stop the sending of the garbage. eFax was never able to stop it, in fact we spent hours trying to determine if the fax was even in their queue. In short we lost a lot of business that day and managed to piss off ALL of our customers at once. We are going back to using a regular fax machine. Has anyone else had a situation where the danger of technology loosing you business outweigh the efficiencies gained?"
Why did you upload a PS file ? (Score:1, Funny)
Re:Why did you upload a PS file ? (Score:5, Informative)
From: eFax supported File Types [efax.com]
Re:Why did you upload a PS file ? (Score:3, Funny)
Pwned! (Score:3, Funny)
Tune in next week when we bury our customers in Spam, sell their contact information to telemarketers, and (yes!) actually call them at home while they are eating dinner.
Customers getting complacent or even borderline happy with your service?
Is your Accounts Receivable department bringing in money faster than Accounts Payable can spend it?
Those pesky customers interfering with your real work, or even your Solitare games or web surfing
Re:Why did you upload a PS file ? (Score:1)
Efax Broadcast Fax Supported File Types [j2.com]
No Postscript there.
-dave
Bwahahaha (Score:3, Funny)
Aaaaanyway, the "dangers" of modern day technology! BAH! The SAME THING happened to me
Re:Bwahahaha (Score:1)
Testing (Score:5, Insightful)
You should've tested this new fax technology, in house and then by setting up a group of "special" customers (give them a small discount as incentive) to beta test it with (and since they know there could be errors and they are being compensated, they won't be pissed when there are bugs). After the new fax technology works for a month or two (depending on how much it's used), then, and only then, begin using for everyone. Repeat this procedure on a smaller scale if you are using the software in a never-before-used-way. This technique really goes for most technology.
Re:Testing (Score:4, Interesting)
Why did you change something that was working?
Why did you not test something before it went live?
Why are you blaming eFax?
Why do you still have a job?
We all screw up but most of us do not broadcast the fact on
Beta testing a postscript fax? (Score:2)
Re:Beta testing a postscript fax? (Score:2)
Re:Beta testing a postscript fax? (Score:2)
Re:Beta testing a postscript fax? (Score:2)
Except Adobe Acrobat.
And while it is a bit cumbersome as a PDF viewer, it's not really designed as one -- gsview has that role.
This really shows you're clueless. What do you think the "gs" in "gsview" stands for?
Re:Beta testing a postscript fax? (Score:2)
ghostscript is not gsview. They are separate products. If you think they are the same, you are the one lacking clues.
I'm done here.
Re:Beta testing a postscript fax? (Score:2, Offtopic)
I didn't say it was. gsview is Ghostscript. Here's a link [wisc.edu] if you don't believe me. From the linked README: "GSview is a graphical interface for Ghostscript". So I'm "the one lacking clues"?
Acrobat PDFs are smaller, loader faster, and generally have less problems than those generated by Ghostscript.
Re:Beta testing a postscript fax? (Score:2)
Re:Beta testing a postscript fax? (Score:2)
2. TOC and links are damn near useless in my book. The proper role of PDFs is as a portable format for representing material to be printed. Everything else the idiot savants at Adobe have crammed into the spec is gravy designed to suck in dollars for them. There are a thousand document formats that are less cumbersome and more featureful than PDF for online viewing.
3. On my watch, Distiller has generated PDFs that won't color-separate properly. Ghostscript never has.
I'm done here.
Re:Beta testing a postscript fax? (Score:2)
Citation, please? Or did you just pull that out of your ass? Show me one quote from the spec or someone on the spec committee that says so.
Re:Beta testing a postscript fax? (Score:2)
Re:Beta testing a postscript fax? (Score:2)
Everything you try "should work". If it were supposed to fail, you wouldn't be doing it at all. That's not an excuse for not testing to confirm.
Re:Beta testing a postscript fax? (Score:2)
What made you think that EFax was PS compatible? (Score:2)
Re:What made you think that EFax was PS compatible (Score:2)
Re:What made you think that EFax was PS compatible (Score:2)
MS Word
MS Access
MS Excel
MS Excel
Word Perfect
ASCII Comma Delimited
RTF Files
Adobe Acrobat
-David
You changed formats and didn't bother to test it (Score:5, Insightful)
Was your switch to eFax just a whim too? I certainly hope not. Was the first thing you sent through it a full-scale mailing to all your clients? I certainly hope not.
Blaming and dumping eFax is not the solution here. You should've tested your change in procedure. They worked fine with the old procedure. If your your office building burned down, would you move all 50 people back to your company's old 4-person office because it never had that problem?
Re:You changed formats and didn't bother to test i (Score:3, Insightful)
This is limitation resulting from first generation 20th century software. 21st century software will note that a person is sending an unusually large document and check (using OCR and a spell checker in the local language on the random portions of the file) to see if it is a rogue transmission (like the common occurance cited abov
Re:You changed formats and didn't bother to test i (Score:2, Insightful)
It's a case of "caveat emptor", or "let the buyer beware": on the one hand, you could blame eFax for the fault, but at the same time, as anyone who deals with business software knows, you always test first.
Re:You changed formats and didn't bother to test i (Score:3, Insightful)
No, eFax's software did *exactly* what it is supposed to do. It is *designed* to accept text input as well as PDF, but not PostScript. This is not a bug, but a feature - you can very easily send faxes just by generating a regular ASCII text file. The PostScript output
Shit Happens (Score:3, Insightful)
Back in the Stone Age, when I ran batch jobs on mainframes, it was common feature of the operating system to automatically abort any jobs that exceeded their resource limits. The resources were things like CPU time, memory usage, number of pages printed. There were default values for the limits and the limits could be modified by Job Control Language directives included at the beginn
Re:You changed formats and didn't bother to test i (Score:4, Interesting)
Garbage-in, Garbage-out. The software cannot think of every possible error condition or mistake. Trying to do so like all the shitty Microsoft products do and lulling people into a false sense of security will turn out much worse than keeping them on their toes, never entirely trusting the software.
The engineers at my company always test their results. Always. No matter how advanced the software becomes, they will always test their results. Because it's very damn important that they're right. Important enough that they will always check. Period.
It is not the responsibility of the software to do your job for you.
Now, one could argue that it *IS* still the responsibility of eFax, if you had some sort of agreement with them. Any sort of SLA or contract, such that you were outsourcing this to them. In that case, eFax should be vetting every fax they receive by an actual human being. It would be trivial to glance at the phone numbers being sent to, the first few pages of a fax to make sure they aren't spewing garbage, and various other simple checks.
Trusting the software to do it is absolutely not the right way to do it. It will never be as accurate as a human. Humans have reasoning and logic. Software only has logic. No amount of logic will make something foolproof. Until someone invents a decent artificial intelligence that does bring some reasoning into the equation, that is the way it will remain.
Re:You changed formats and didn't bother to test i (Score:2)
No one has ever claimed that it should (and I think you know that). Just because you can't detect every possible error in all cases is not an excuse for failing to try to detect the most common or easily detectable errors and issue a warning. An email containing hundreds of pages of gargabe sent to multiple recipients should trigger some sort of warning to the user that this might not be what they intended.
Re:You changed formats and didn't bother to test i (Score:2)
There's a big difference between assuming responsibility and anticipating some boundry condition errors your users may create.
For instance, if I select all 600 messages in my InBox and hit return, AppleMail will come up and say, "are you sure you want to open 600 windows?"
It's an error that could reasonably happen and I've done it a few times myself. The engineers wisely added a simple check to help out the user.
Likewise, the eFax fol
Re:You changed formats and didn't bother to test i (Score:3, Funny)
Good God, I hope not.
It looks like you're trying to write a letter! Would you like some tips?
Sounds familiar? That's what you get when some idiot programmer decides to try to outsmart the users by guessing wh
Is this Ask Slashdot or "Screw EFax"? (Score:5, Insightful)
Heh (Score:3, Funny)
Sure has (Score:2)
As a large producer of computer programs and utilities, we too have found
that the advantages of technology do not out weigh their ability to piss off
customers. On a regular basis our applications commit infractions against the people we are striving to aid.
We do however endeavour to force people into accepting the fact that
technology is not infallible and that glitches occasionally occur.
To this end I must stress that although all our products are tested in controlled
environments, that u
Test fax (Score:5, Funny)
Next week on Ask Slashdot:
Same guy writes: I faxed my customers an apology for crapflooding their fax machines, but eFax misinterpreted the PostScript file again and they got another 300 pages of garbage. They're really pissed now. Man, is eFax screwy or what?
Re:Test fax (Score:1)
If this is your first time using some form of technology **dig dig**>, someone should have warned you it doesn't always work like it says on the pretty brochure.
Once upon a time... (Score:5, Interesting)
Well, before the mailing list functionality was finished, the client called -- they wanted the password for posting messages to the list.
I told them no, because it wasn't done yet. They went to my boss, my boss said "give them the password", to which I said "okay, but make sure they don't use it yet, because it's not working properly. I don't know what would happen."
Needless to say (but I'll say it anyway), they ignored me. That night, they sent out a single-word email to the hundreds of people on the list.
The email said "test".
Unfortunately, the email also had, as a Word attachment, THE NAMES AND ADDRESSES OF THOUSANDS OF CUSTOMERS OF THIS CLIENT. I can only assume (they never took the blame) that the owner of the company (who requested the password) wanted to "test" if the mailing list could handle attachments.
To top it all off, since the functionality wasn't done yet (and I was too naive to think they'd ignore my advice not to use the list yet), the mailing list was broken. The reply-to address was the mailing list's address, and the password feature was, unbeknownst to me, broken.
Every response to the "test" mailing (usually "why did you send me these people's addresses?!?") was automatically sent out to everyone on the list.
Uh oh.
This became a problem around 9am EST, when people started checking their email at work. By the time I found out about it an hour later, thousands of emails were flying around, lawsuits were being threatened, and our client insisted it was ME who sent out the test email. I felt especially bad for the webTV users on the list, who couldn't delete the mail as fast as it was coming in.
At the end of the day, I spend the entire week calling and emailing people to apologize on behalf of the client -- not because the client wanted it, as the client wanted us to tell the customers to GTH -- but because I felt so awful about clogging their mailboxes with garbage.
Lessons learned:
1. Always keep technology disabled until it's tested and ready to be run;
2. Never develop in a production environment;
3. Clients never listen, and never own up to their own mistakes;
4. People do genuinely feel much better when you apologize for your mistakes by phone than they do when you do it by email.
Re:Once upon a time... (Score:1)
OK, this is not in the same class as the OP or the parent, but I have found that when I try to print at work using Samba, it has about a 50% probability of hanging the queue until somebody power cycles the printer. A good way to get unpopular and promote negative attitudes about Linux among your co-workers :-)
Re:Once upon a time... (Score:2)
And yup, shifting media when the channels of communication breaks down in one is always a good idea. Not only can you appeal to people at a different level, you can also take a little time off, reflect on the situation and t
Don't send with eFax (Score:1)
Re:Don't send with eFax (Score:1)
Re:Don't send with eFax (Score:3, Interesting)
Clearly operator error (Score:4, Interesting)
Internet-based faxing solution are really good things(tm). I don't want a paper fax machine hanging around and I don't want to dink with faxmodem sharing and all that. I really like having everything show up in my Inbox, as I can receive faxes while not at my office.
I would read up on the capabilities of their service and beg them to let you come back.
-m
This is why you have a job. (Score:4, Interesting)
Yes, absolutely, every day. This is what most technology jobs are about. If technology was flawless, then most of us wouldn't have jobs at all.
And technology isn't flawless. In fact, alot of technology gets more and more complex every year. eFax is supposed to be simple to use, yet people still email me eFax attachments every year (Write plain text document in Word, convert the
In your case, it sounds like you or someone else in your company was too hasty to use PS formats instead of PDFs.
It's hard to tell if you simply misunderstood how to upload a
What I would appreciate as a customer... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:What I would appreciate as a customer... (Score:1)
Yup (Score:2, Funny)
It was called Windows...
Hah (Score:2, Insightful)
If the tech industry will continue to be ruled by Business Major idiots, we'll see this every day or every week, and more of it all the time... *sigh*
I've been in the business for only 10 years, but I've seen this stuff every-day...
eFax DOES support PS (Score:4, Informative)
Sounds like they screwed you, dude.
Or you had some app that barfed out nonstandard PS code.
Re:eFax DOES support PS (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:eFax DOES support PS (Score:1)
"Loosing" (Score:4, Informative)
Re:"Loosing" (Score:2)
It's bad enough when this "loose" trash ends up in the comments. But on the front page?! Drives me absolutely crazy
I happen to write fax server software. (Score:4, Informative)
Having said that, whenever I send a fax I always send it with "Hold for Preview" so I can look at it first. There is often a big difference between the way a document looks when printed and it looks when faxed, and I want to make sure it looks good and is exactly what I want it to be. The best you can get out of fax is 200x200 black & white if you want to have any general compatibility with the fax machines of the world. If for some reason I can't preview it, I send a test one back to myself and make sure that looks ok. Then I forward it to the real destination or send it to them with exactly the same settings and the exact same source.
People have said "don't you trust your server" and I'm like "would you type a letter and print it out and mail it sight unseen?" There are often differences between the on-screen representation, the printed output, and the faxed output. In particular if you don't realize that fax resolution is 1/6 to 2/3 the resolution of a document printed on a regular printer. I've had people try to fax 600dpi color photos to a 200dpi black and white fax machine then complain about how bad it looks. What do you expect? You have to understand the limitations of your media.
Re:I happen to write fax server software. (Score:1)
Re:I happen to write fax server software. (Score:2)
Re:I happen to write fax server software. (Score:1)
Re:I happen to write fax server software. (Score:2)
RHylafax?
Re:Try hylafax (Score:1)
email (Score:2)
Similar experience (Score:2)
As part of a flood remediation process, we had developed a system for transporting fluids out of a containment area into a waste exhaust line. The base component of the system was a scopa, sometimes also called a besen. Anyway, the system's production was fine until it reached a certain volume threshold, at which point it would become overwhelmed and lag behind. So, one of our junior engineers (
Been there, dealt with that (Score:2)
One time, a PDF didn't convert properly, and the recipients started getting faxes with 300 pages of PostScript gibberish. Fortunately we managed to stop it before too many of the faxes went out.
So, here's what I did t
just get your own fax server (Score:2)
Biscom (http://www.biscom.com/) will sell you a Linux-based solution.