There are always lots of "scandals" reported about the level of service that organisations provide to their prospects and customers.  One of the measures used in the surveys is responsiveness to enquiries and one of the detailed measures is how long it takes organisations to respond to emails. 

Many sites have email mailto: links dotted around their sites.  Some of these are generic email addresses like sales@xxxxx.com and some are the email addresses of specific individuals.  The generic ones tend to work OK as they tend to change very infrequently but the specific ones need to be kept up to date especially if they are an important means of your prospects and customers to make contact with you.  It becomes even more important if this is a means for them to raise a concern or complaint with your organisation.  You will turn a concern into a complaint and a complaint into a rant if the email bounces and, as the surveys reveal, if the email disappears into a black hole and no one responds that raises the temperature still further.

Email is becoming a key element of most companies communications.  And it's not just the mailto: links on your own websites that are important.  There are  many on-line and off-line mediums that are used to communicate with prospects, customers, partners or suppliers and some of these may have generic or specific email addresses that are important to ensure that they are still valid.

But there can be other problems with email addresses other than they have been removed from the mail server's directory.  Many organisations have a limit on the size of the in-box associated with the email address.  Once this is full you have to start deleting or archiving emails to free up space before you can receive any more emails.  Incoming emails can be bounced under these circumstances and will certainly be delayed.

It's important, then to ensure that all of your "important" email addresses are up to date and working.  Sitemorse will currently alert you to any problems with your mailto: links on your websites and in the near future will be able to check other email addresses that you wish us to test.

Beyond pure email address checking there is also your email infrastructure.  This is often made up of load balanced primary servers, secondary servers and fail-over servers.  All of these are defined in the MX records of your DNS.  We currently test all the servers defined in a MX record for the sites we are testing and report any errors we find.  It's remarkably easy to mess up the MX definitions and render your mail server infrastructure inefficient.  We often highlight problems at this level for organisations. Mail server infrastructures often perform well under medium levels of load but with badly defined MX they can rapidly deteriorate when under load or failure situations.

This is another area where your customer service can suffer and needs to be checked on a regular basis.