Due to GDPR, you can't mail our support any more | Hacker News Reader

Due to GDPR, you can't mail our support any more

I got the following from a hosting company today: "In order to tighten up security and streamline our support operations in preparation for the implementation of GDPR, we will be removing the ability to email in support requests. Email is not an infallible technology and there are instances where support requests have not reached our team."

Asking them to explain further they wrote back : "Email is not a secure medium and tickets often end up in the wrong account / place. Only by removing this can be ensure that requests are entirely submitted under the account in question and we can thus comply with removing all personal data."

I hadn't heard of a company doing this due to GDPR and it never occured it would be an issue for our own client support. Thoughts?

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"Email is not a secure medium and tickets often end up in the wrong account / place."

I'm assuming this means that their ticketing system is shared across all their functions (so facilities use the same ticket system as IT and so on), if I email a ticket in with 'my account number is 123, my name is mrpatch and my phone number is 0123456789' and it ends up in the facilities queue, or a queue that is available to facilities, then they are breaching GDPR as that is PII that is visible to people who are not authorised to view that information.

By removing the ability to email in a query the data that is entered into the ticketing system can be better managed (from the example above the telephone number can be entered into the correct 'telephone' field that facilities can't see).

Perhaps a bit of a sledgehammer to crack a nut from a company that's struggling to fit their existing systems around the new legislation.

It's rubbish... they obv can't handle data correctly or securely.

If an email ticket ends up in the wrong account why would you trust them with your hosting business?

if you're emailing support@myhostingcompany.com and it ends up in a shared mailbox, then it isn't allocated to your account like it is when you're using the ticketing system.

when using a ticketing system a unique mailbox is created for the issue, only the agent that was allocated to the issue has access to data.

A ticketing system can collect messages from a mailbox, I don't see what the problem is... support@ should be for support = simple as that. It shouldn't be a shared mailbox that the whole company can access - that is my point.

I've several contract with many different suppliers, hosted ticking systems myself and never had this issue (And yes - dealing with the dreaded GDPR myself now too).

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