Complaining about email

[walkitout]

Someone set up an IHG account using my gmail account. Yes, IHG did not round trip the email address before very very permanently attaching it to an account. I immediately reset the password and tried to change the email. It kept telling me every email I gave it was invalid. I had previously lost Hilton to someone using my gmail. I tried a lot of things, but all of them failed. I was told by someone on phone customer service to take over the account, change the email and then try to get my email on my account to change to that email. I never could get that to work.

So when the booked stay was over, and they sent a survey to me asking about it, I 1 starred everything (no, I did NOT post a review; I haven’t hit that point yet, altho I can see it in the distance) and said over and over again in every box that someone set up an account with my email please remove my email from your system.

I got this email response a few minutes later:


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Good Morning,

I hope all is well.

I am reaching out from Hotel Indigo in Naperville. You recently filled out a survey saying you did not stay here. I am following up on that. We
show a Priceline reservation under the name Walkitout’s IRL Name arrived on the 21st of Feb. Is that not correct?

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To which I replied:

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Someone gave you my email in error.

I did not stay in Naperville.

Please remove my email from your system.

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But now I’m thinking, oh, shit, the problem is actually over at Priceline. *sigh*

It took me a really long time to figure out how to grab the etsy account someone set up using my email. I never did figure out how to fix the ebay account using my email.

This is easily the strongest argument against the Strong AI argument. I mean, we live in _this_ world. No one is coming to save us from ourselves.

ETA:

Operations Manager at the hotel is saying he can remove my email. !!! Fingers crossed.

Also, I went over to Priceline, but Priceline doesn’t have an account using my email. It looks like they let you book as a guest, and input any email. *sigh*

A little light googling suggests that the hospitality industry in general worries about email accuracy primarily through a direct marketing lens. Extra special *sigh*.

I shouldn’t be this agitated about this. I’ve spent months trying to get Huntsville Pain Management, a medical facility, to quit sending me patient emails about appointments, billing, and so forth. I’ve called them repeatedly, and they just cannot seem to remove my email from their system. They’ve asked me if maybe I’m related to the patient? It’s so difficult for Huntsville Pain Management to update the contact information for their patients. I just don’t understand why.

ETAYA:

More from Naperville’s Operations Manager:

I called the other Mrs. ***** from Atlanta who stayed here and IHG got the email wrong like you said her has no dot.


Walkitout blinks slowly and replies (including a link to the relevant google help page):

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Thank you for reaching out to your guest / customer through an accurate contact method.

If your guest / customer has told you that their email is firstlast@gmail.com, they are wrong.

That email also will go to me. Their email has to have some other number or letter in it.

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I’m not feeling a lot of optimism about this, however, he has been meticulously polite and he has stuck with it, so perhaps he will learn some things. It’s not really his fault. The fault lies with software that demands email addresses, when a huge slice of humanity doesn’t use email, just text. For a lot of customer/client contact info, it should be possible to do all communication through text, because a lot of people are just lying when they supply an email anyway or they never check their email. If you cannot conduct business purely through text OR purely through email, you’ve basically decided to abandon a bunch of customers. Which is fine! But you should stop pretending.