Thursday, 14 February 2008

Fremantle Saga continues to run

Those of you who read my blog regularly will remember my "Fremantle Trust Saga". For years I have been getting wrongly addressed e-mail because the Fremantle Trust (a care provider based in the UK) cannot do something as simple as get their OWN email addresses correct.

Last October I blogged about it and it got picked up by the press. I was immediately contacted by the Fremantle Trust who promised to sort it out. I rejoiced in the fact that I would stop receiving personal details of residents, employees and other confidential information I didn't want.

At the time I was warned: "Beware. They're still incompetent."

Those words have turned out to be prophetic. This month (which is only half over), I have received 21 emails aimed for the Fremantle Trust. Its actually going up. And some of them are "new offenders" - in other words new people who have just started sending email wrongly. So you can't even blame the email client's auto-complete for this.

Here are some of the subject I've recently received:
  • FARLEY HOUSE, LUTON, PLANNING
  • Swag [actually about getting rid of past resident's property I believe]
  • GP Permission to crush tablets
  • Benchmarking of Finance Services
  • Team Meeting Notes
  • Sharnbrook Next of Kin
In the past I have contacted the Chief Executive of Fremantle, as well as various local authorities, managers and so forth. It seems amazing that 4 months after they said they would sort this out, the level of email has actually increased.


1 comments:

Jonathan Marsh said...

Maybe you need a business model solution to the problem. Maybe you could set up some rules that would identify misdirected mail and redirect it. Then approach them with a reverse-scaling per-message transaction cost for the service you're providing. The more messages per month, the higher the monthly fee will be, which will incentivize them not to abuse your domain. Any unpaid invoices will result in mails being archived publicly on the web instead ;-).