Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

I just tried to submit some questions via the "Contact Us" page on the AT&T Wireless Services web site. The message didn't go through, and I got an error message saying "try again later", so I hit the 'back' button on my browser, and tried re-submitting my message later. And again later still. Then I started experimenting.

Here's how the messages I posted through that page came back to me (with slight editing for format and to remove extraneous machine-added verbiage):

From: dglenn@radix.net
To: customer_service@attws.com
Bcc: 
Received: 07/24/2002 22:23:24
Subject: Website Feedback

Trying to send a message on another topic, I get:
     
=================================

Application Message
An error has occurred while processing your request. Please try again later.
     
Message 1310

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but trying again later hasn't produced any different results so far.  
     
I'm trying this in order to check whether Message 1310 refers to a 
size limit on email or something ... if it does, I'm going to be 
Very Annoyed, since there's no warning of a limit before a user 
spends a while typing up his or her message.

And a couple minutes later:

From: dglenn@radix.net
To: customer_service@attws.com
Bcc: 
Received: 07/24/2002 22:27:24
Subject: Website Feedback

Okay, my last message was accepted by your system.  Now the question:  
How small do the chunks I chop up my first message (the one that keeps 
getting rejected with an uninformative error message) have to be?
     
And why is there a limit so small that my customer-service questions 
won't fit?  Doesn't that kind of defeat the purpose?
     
Finally:  FIX THE ERROR MESSAGE to indicate what the actual problem is, 
rather than hinting that it's some temporary server problem or 
something!!!  Better yet, indicate what the message-length cutoff is 
Before The User Starts Typing!
     
This is not very advanced user-interface design -- these are 
_fundamentals_.  There's no excuse for getting these wrong.

I hereby hold the designers of the AT&T Wireless Services Online Customer Service web site (or whoever at AT&T disregarded the designers' advice and told them to build it brokenly) up to ridicule. They got the easy stuff so very, very wrong.

I'm not sure I even got a useful email address out of it as a side effect (I prefer to send messages from an environment that logs things alongside all my other outgoing mail when it's sent, and users my choice of editor, rather than using a web interface to send email). Part of the verbiage I deleted said not to reply to these messages, but to send any further questions via the website. *sigh*

Part of the Too Large Message was a complaint that couldn't get to the information I sought because the site requires JavaScript to get to those sections, and another part was about an ongoing billing problem I've been having difficulty resolving over the phone.