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Comment by ikeboy | Hacker News Reader

> I can’t help them and I’ve learned over the years that just trying to explain how I have nothing to do with the product they’re using is often just too time consuming and energy draining to be worth it.

You could write out a form response once, then just send it to everyone, and not respond to follow-ups. Not that you have to, of course, but it shouldn't be energy draining, at least.

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I've been in that position before, where people would find my e-mail address as a supposed tech support for something I have no relationship with whatsoever. Usually when you tell them they have a wrong e-mail, they get really angry ("I want to talk to your manager!" kind of angry). So it's better to just not respond at all.

What about quietly forwarding the email to the legit tech support mailbox for Toyota, if such a thing exists? Are there problems with that approach (other than the tech support people replying to you instead of their customer).

As he said in the comments, if they couldn't find a support email, why would he be able to? The issue is not Toyota-specific, there are tons of different cars shipping curl; is he supposed to become some sort of customer-support switchboard?

It's a lot of effort and one which you wouldn't expect businesses to do this so I don't really see why open source projects should be any different.

If there's a limited amount of car companies, why not just compile one email with a big list of contact numbers, and use that reply template whenever you get such an email.

I suppose you could even send it out automatically based on filter conditions?

And then those numbers change, and how are you gonna know? Do you periodically call them all? Do you wait for people to get mad at you because the number has changed, before you spend more time figuring out what the number is supposed to be today? And what if you don't even know all manufacturers from Asia or Brazil? And what if people complain that they want the number for their own language or country? That list gets very long very quickly.

But above all, why should he care? He's a developer, doesn't get a dime from such carmakers, why should it be his problem?

> Do you wait for people to get mad at you

Who cares? If they get mad, they get mad.

Former email support manager here.

People seeking technical support often resist redirection once they've been assured, through direct contact, that they have the attention of someone knowledgeable.

To put it plainly: your solution doesn't work. Our team was responsible for the tech support for a very generically named Usenet service. Very often, people looking for the .com version of our .net service would email us continually looking for a resolution to something or other. No amount of explanations deterred them and we often had to stop responding.

That sounds extremely funny. I would pay good money to get to be on the receiving end of "I want to talk to your manager!" when you can act however you want.

It gets old very quickly.

I used to have a phone number that was one easily mistaken digit away from the largest pizzeria in town, and people angrily complaining about wrong or delayed orders was not funny. One of my siblings sometimes took orders he had no intention of fulfilling :P

Edit: see also legal (or other) threats, from the same author (mentioned elsewhere in the comments)

https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2016/01/19/subject-urgent-warnin...

"Also, I have yet to figure out how to unhack the hackers"

Couldn't read any further due to tears in my eyes from laugh.

It can't help matters that the domain is "haxx" ;)

"Also, Spotify is a major partner of Spotify"

Wow, really?

If they came across and were familiarized with your name and email address in multiple locations, I wouldn't want to make them angrier for the 1% who are going to go manage to find my address somewhere and come find me. Best to just not touch the situation at all.

When the confused person responds, agitated that someone they think is supposed to help them is deflecting their concerns, that's probably emotionally draining.

If that's the issue they could also block them after replying.

At that point, the damage is done. Why is this better than just not replying, again?

Because some people will understand the first reply.

I'd venture to suggest that the overlap between the set of people who will understand the first reply and the set of people who understand that daniel@haxx.se (or whatever it was) is not a tech support address for Toyota, is very small.

You could even set up a filter to autoreply when it detects a combination of an unusually large number of automotive terms, the word "help", or similar.

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