191–200 of 366 posts
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> have a token mailed to your physical address on file This is the worst for the customer point of view. Takes a long time.
It on average 24h or less, considering that mail through DHL is next-morning delivery everywhere, and same-day delivery in larger cities.
As someone who has trained customer support agents, I can attest to the fact that most agents have to be taught every scenario. If it slightly deviates from the one they have been trained on, they are clueless. Not saying all customer support people are like this. However, majority of people are. They rely on pre-written scripts. When a question is asked, they search for the template question with the answer.
Most companies would do well to invest in "Customer Support Engineer" type roles, putting people who understand systems and are informed problem solvers on the front lines, people who can identify technical solutions to customer problems. Customer Support Representatives problem solving seems to begin and end with what they've learned from the latest ZenDesk Webinar. Most companies seem to believe that fast and friendly messages are what customers want, through twitter and Facebook, when the reality is they want their problem solved and the business most benefits when the cause is identified and solved for all customers, not the symptoms for one customer.
Most companies could slice their customer support costs in half and increase their customer satisfaction substantially if they invested in building out roles for problem solvers instead of ticket solvers. 1 ticket solved is 1 ticket solved. A problem solved can be hundreds or thousands of future tickets prevented and an improved customer experience.
(This comment isn't a slight against customer service representatives, they serve an important purpose at many companies and often provide great value. This comment is a slight against the companies that choose to hire a dozen more customer support representatives instead of addressing the core issues that are driving people to their support.)
> services should allow me to easily create lots of aliases. Right now the best defense against social engineering seems to be my fastmail account which allows me to create 1 email address alias per service What you may want is a catch-all email - which lets you do @domain.com -> nmjohn@domain.com (where is everything besides already defined addresses) - that way you can make up emails on the fly without having to se…
Note, though, that catch-all emails will also catch a ridiculous amount of spam. Creating each account name individually avoids that problem, at the cost of some extra trouble when registering a new service. An intermediate step that may work if you don't expect people to target you individually: have one or more required substrings for the email local part, and catch all mail to addresses containing that substring.
Hasn't been a problem for me.
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A related word of warning: Namecheap updated their registration page last year. Now, when you register a domain it tells you free Whoisguard is included, but it doesn't make it clear that it's disabled by default." Previously it just worked. Now you have to check another box to turn it on. This change makes no sense to me. (If you want free Whoisguard, why would you not want it turned on?) I was white-hot furious* wh…
Worse, they'll happily sell you Whoisguard for domains that don't support it. When you discover it's not usable, they'll give you a refund, then include it again in the next billing cycle. I switched to Namecheap based on recommendations here, and their previous stance on certain privacy issues, but I'm running out of alternatives.
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Hiding your contact information is like security through obscurity. I'm not saying it's not a good extra step to decrease the frequency of attacks (much like changing an SSH port to 3857 or something), but it doesn't add any real security. This is the crux of the problem; our addressees and birthdays are treated like passwords by these companies.
Passwords are also security by obscurity.
There's also no way to separate AWS account from Amazon account it seems: https://forums.aws.amazon.com/thread.jspa?threadID=85882 This is really bad. The security implications are different between the two.
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Sadly, you can't even use PO boxes for all domains, some registries require a "full" address.
USPS now supports a feature called "street addressing". Basically, instead of writing "PO Box #" as the address, you may write the actual street address of the same facility followed by your box number, something like "123 Main St #456". Private mailbox providers also often accept addresses like "123 Main St Apt 456", where 456 is the number of your mailbox as well.
Keep in mind that street addressing doesn't work at all USPS locations, although it does work at most of them. You have to fill out a form with USPS or any mail addressed to that location will be returned as undeliverable.
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I just do compapyname@mydomain.com. That's how I knew Broderbund sold my email address.
I was doing that but some companies think you are "hacking" if you put the company name in. Like I don't think you can do facebook@mydomain.com on Facebook.