This article is intended to help you reduce your support wait times and requirements by giving you some very simple advice:

When opening a support ticket, bring us your original problem. Don’t bring us what you think is the cause of your problem, it quite often isn’t. Some examples are below.

Common Ticket #1

Problem statement by user: “Your IP address is blacklisted and I need you to get it removed ASAP.”

Problem with this ticket: We know for a fact that blacklisting isn’t a problem, it’s heavily monitored and most likely the IP they are looking at is one that doesn’t even send mail from our platform, nor is it mentioned in any headers for any mail our customers send. Now we’re arguing about whether or not blacklisting of a particular IP is actually relevant, and we’re several days into a ticket that cannot be resolved in it’s current state. All they had to do was say “I tried to do X, I expected Y, but instead Z happened.” Had they started with that, the problem probably would have been resolved or explained in under 2 hours.

The actual problem that they needed solved: They sent one email and the recipient says they didn’t receive it. In almost every case, we have logs of the recipient’s server taking the email from us and claiming that it will deliver it.

Common Ticket #2

Problem statement by user: “I’m not receiving any email.”

Problem with this ticket: We look at domains under their account and confirm inbound email received. We’ve both just wasted an hour of each other’s time, because what they should have said was “I expected an email from SenderA to RecipientB with SubjectC on DateD and I did not receive it.”

The actual problem that they needed solved: They configured their spam filters to reject this message.