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eFax Hell?
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?"
Efax does not accept them as far as I know. That would be mistake #1. What advantages would a PS file possibly have over a PDF, did you just want to try to save in a new format willy nilly? Do you run a business or a fun house?
An Education is the Font of All Liberty
Sorry, that's just funny. But I shouldn't be laughing at your problems. ..well, not the SAME thing.. with a regular fax machine. I was going to send a 4 or 5 page fax to a partner... with the fax machine that was known to be "acting up". I just put the papers in the tray, hit the speed dial and Send and left.... only to come back about an hour later to find that the fax was still transmitting. Next day I got a call from our partner, telling me i owed them a roll of fax paper :). Thank God for office supplies.
Aaaaanyway, the "dangers" of modern day technology! BAH! The SAME THING happened to me
It sounds like you didn't do much testing. I write programs to do jobs at my work, and though I believe in my abilities, I also don't believe I'm God. Therefore, I test everything thoroughly before I use them in production. And I'm public sector. In the private sector, it's even more crucial as your customers can actually walk away.
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.
-- Political fascism requires a Fuhrer.
It would never occur to me to even attempt to send EFax a postscript file; what made you think that the driver was compatible?
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
That's why businesses have policies, procedures, rules, and those sorts of things. I realize they're no fun, but they prevent shit like that from happening.
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?
Random and weird software I've written.
I have to admit that I have experienced my share of frustration with EFax but this question rings of retribution more than a real request for answers.
Only with computers can you make millions of mistakes per second.
Dear sir,
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 using our applications outside our clean room, and agreeing
to the click through agreement, you, not us, are responsible for
the Mongolian cluster F*** that ensues.
Insincerely,
Bill Gates
flinging poop since 1969
Perhaps it might be prudent to send the file to a single fax machine first, to make sure that this won't happen in the future. As for the current siuation, perhaps you can fax your customers some blank paper to make up the loss.
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?
Unknown host pong.
When I was new to web programming, about seven years ago, I was making one of my first web sites for a client. It featured a mailing list you could sign up for, so that the client could send you advertising. Ugh. It was initially seeded with a list they obtained from a hastily-made (by someone else) "give us your email address" form on the old site, which also asked for home address and whatnot. Hundreds of people were on the list.
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.
I use eFax only for receiving faxes, not sending them. I can't imagine why you'd spend the extra money to send faxes. The whole point behind eFax is so that you don't have to have a dedicated phone line and a fax machine connected 24/7.
And the men who hold high places must be the ones who start
To mold a new reality... closer to the heart
I agree with everyone else--you shouldn't have changed from PDF to PS. I can't imagine PS is supported (appears not from your results).
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
http://www.invisik.com
Has anyone else had a situation where the danger of technology loosing you business outweigh the efficiencies gained?
.doc to eFax, email to me. Argggg...)
.ps document into eFax properly, or if you actually triggered a bug within eFax. Either way, you should have tested this major change before pushing it out.
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
"Can of worms? The can is open... the worms are everywhere."
...is to have a formal apology letter PERSONALLY signed by your CEO along with a CASE of paper (to make up for the waisted paper from the 300 page fax, and for the toner for that matter). It might cost you a bit, but I think it would go a long way to mend a few fences, so to speak.
"1984" was ment to be a warning, not a guidebook. You hear that Kim Jong-il!? BushCo?!
What kind of beta test is that? Someone just output PS instead of PDF. that shoulda worked no problem. Maybe they should have just sent a PS fax to themselves first, and learn to make it a habit.
Photos.
"Has anyone else had a situation where the danger of technology loosing you business outweigh the efficiencies gained?"
It was called Windows...
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
Has anyone else had a situation where the danger of technology loosing you business outweigh the efficiencies gained?
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...
As seen here>
Sounds like they screwed you, dude.
Or you had some app that barfed out nonstandard PS code.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
See here: Loose-Lose
-- $SIGNATURE
Interpage
In interest of full disclosure, I have never known anyone who used eFax, but I have known people who used Interpage.
It's the #1 fax server in the country and quite probably the world. Modesty forbids telling you which one, but it starts with an 'R'. I didn't write the core code, but I've written a lot of the additional functionality and touched the majority of the code base over the years. I trust it to be nice and stable, and it has a reputation for reliability and consistency.
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.
I understand your position and agree with it. But underlying the position is the assumption that the basic technology can't be trusted because it sometimes just doesn't work.
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 above of a PDF document misformatted as a PS). The eFax will communicate (why not with a voice synthesized cell phone message?) with the sender that a rogue document is queued.
It is the responsibility of the users of 20th century office equipment to guard against runaway applications like this. But it is the responsibility of the sellers of 21st century business solutions like eFax to incorporate advanced error checking like this into their product. As we enter the age of 4GHz CPU speeds, 128 bit processors, terabyte hard drives, and GigaByte RAM banks, our PCs demand truly advanced software too.
So I'm going to go against your decision that this was the customer's fault for not closely monitoring a format change. I believe that it's partially eFax's fault for not coding their service against a common and catostophic client error.
Programmers need to get out of the 20th century mindset that if a program works in the software lab then it is finished. Actually by 21st century standards, its development has simply completed the first and easest phase. It now needs to be developed so that it works flawlessly in the bizarre and common error situations found in the field.
This is testing mode in our company, but so far it has been working flawlessly. Just sending 1 fax per week :P
"So I'm going to go against your decision that this was the customer's fault for not closely monitoring a format change"
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.
Instead of sending out your newsletter by fax, you might want to set it up to work over email. Or give your customers the option to receive either one.
It's good to use your head, but not as a battering ram.
So I'm going to go against your decision that this was the customer's fault for not closely monitoring a format change. I believe that it's partially eFax's fault for not coding their service against a common and catostophic client error.
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 is one big, honking, ugly text file, which eFax's software sent exactly as the careless poster asked it to...
"The future's good and the present is nothing to sneeze at." - Roblimo's last
That may be your optimal world, but it's not realistic.
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.
Random and weird software I've written.
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 what they're doing: An unholy pain in the rear that every halfway-experienced user makes it their first order of business to deactivate with extreme prejudice before trying to make productive use of their a computer.
When I am trying to crush a deadly snake that is slithering across my thumb, the last thing I want is my Microsoft Hammer beeping at me and refusing to deal the blow because there's no nail around and it's worried I might accidentally hurt my thumb.
"Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all other countries because you were born in it." -- GBS
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 beginning of the job. The default values were large enough for most jobs, but small enough to quickly kill jobs that were malfunctioning due to bugs or bad input data. This was important because usage of the mainframe's resources was billed back to the user. It prevented a runaway job from wiping out an individual's or department's budget for computer use. Without these limits, one run of a buggy program could exhaust a student's entire allocation of computer usage for a semester.
The point is that people make mistakes, and these mistakes are often predictable. Designing the system to limit the damage caused by a mistake is just good engineering.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
Yet another successful project spearheaded by the Sales Prevention Team!
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?
-
Call us and we will send one of our Sales Prevention Professionals right over to straighten matters out. No job too big, no product too good - at SPT we guarantee results!
Glonoinha the MebiByte Slayer
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.
I'd rather be lucky than good.
Perhaps .PS on the list of supported file types had something to do with his opinion?
Tech Public Policy stuff
Yup. Make sure you can build *one* correctly before you try to build a billion.
gewg_
We had a similar experience happen to us when we introduced some new/different technology (albeit not with eFax).
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 (an apprentice-level one, actually) made an enhancement that basically increased the abilty for the scopa to self-regulate itself. Without testing, the modification was rolled out to all of the scopas and deployed.
The outcome was not pretty, with the end result being that the fluid removal process over-drove the capacity of the waste line and flooded back into the container and causing all sorts of mess.
Man, Mickey sure got a lecture that day!
Ryosen
One man's "Troll, +1" is another man's "Insightful, +1".
Yep, I had that happen to me, too. I wrote a broadcast fax system for my local Chamber of Commerce. It uses Ghostscript to convert PDFs to PostScript, and then uses efax (the Linux command-line fax utility, not the efax.com service) to send the faxes out to their 800+ members and contacts.
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 to prevent that from reoccurring:
1. Set it up to first try converting with pdf2ps, and to fall back on pdftops if that fails. Those utilities are from two separate packages. Neither one will convert 100% of PDFs, but one usually works whenever the other fails. We've not really had any problems with conversion since.
2. Set it up to send a test fax to the Chamber, so they can preview it before sending out the whole batch of them.
That was a couple years ago. They've been using it since then to send out several broadcasts a week, and have had no hiccups.
Hope that helps.
I don't see PostScript files listed on eFax's supported formats list:
MS Word
MS Access
MS Excel
MS Excel
Word Perfect
ASCII Comma Delimited
RTF Files
Adobe Acrobat
-David
* As is generally the case, my opinions do not reflect those of my employer.
Go out and spend a couple of thousand dollars, get your own fax server.
Biscom (http://www.biscom.com/) will sell you a Linux-based solution.
I passed the Turing test.
It is not the responsibility of the software to do your job for you.
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 folks could have written:
if (document.pageCount > 20) {
warn("Send a %d page fax?",document.pageCount);
}
and they should have.
Of course given the simplicity of the code, one has to wonder why this check wasn't implemented. Do they charge per page? Hmmm...
My personal experience with them was that I had an free eFax account for about 5 years. I probably averaged 3 or 4 non-spam fax pages a year, and I received their advertising e-mails for the entire period. This year I got about 4 pages of fax a week for about 6 weeks while trying to deal with a legal issue. Add in the junk fax load and it pushed my pagecount over their 25-page maximum. So they canceled my account. I'm sure they try to get out from under as many free accounts as they can and use cancellations as a way to force people into subscriptions. I had actually planned on upgrading to one of their pay-for services, but you can tell alot about a company from how they pinch pennies. So, eFax won't be getting my money and I recommend that you learn something by studying their behavior patterns.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)