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Comment by garply | Hacker News Reader

I have a gripe against Twilio. Aside from their China service sucking, they keep sending me newsletters or emails that are tailored to look like they're personally written to me. The subject looks like "RE: Twilio's Developer Community" and then the text preview in gmail looks something like "Hi Joe, I wanted to drop..."

Effective at getting me to open the email, but I always feel deceived when I open it up to see the cookie-cutter mail that they've sent me.

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If Tropo can do anything to help you in China please let us know. Asia is a key market for Voxeo/Tropo. We have two data centers there (Singapore and Hong Kong), as well as an R&D, support, and sales team with about a dozen people in Beijing. Feel free to email me at jtaylor at voxeo dot com.

hey curious to know what you mean about "Chinese service sucking" since we're not international yet... are you referring to outbound calls to Chinese numbers, or something else?

Outbound calls to a Chinese number had a failure rate of about 50% (failed with a couple of different error messages, can't quite remember what exactly they were anymore, although I remember thinking they didn't seem particularly relevant... like claiming the number dialed was busy even when it definitely wasn't, etc). Also sometimes the calls would go through but then disconnect immediately after I picked up and I would get billed for them. Basically, my experience calling China was that the service was totally unreliable and a bit expensive (by expensive I mean I was unhappy being billed for dropped calls).

Thanks, there are different challenges with international routing by country and by receiving carrier. I'll definitely pass this information along, and if you have specific calls (I'd need your Twilio account ID to look at them, better sent via email) that will help a lot, too. We know international support is important to developers everywhere, and we're definitely working on it.

International is hard. I know from experience. That's where Tropo has one clear advantage over Twilio. Tropo is built on the Voxeo network, which has ten years of international experience, is deployed world-wide (seven data centers), and integrates directly with most of the carriers around the world.

I believe Twilio integrates directly with a single carrier (Level3). Last I checked they use/resell bandwidth.com for most of their calls.

-Jonathan (Voxeo CEO)

To correct a misconception, Twilio works with a variety of carriers, including Level3 and Bandwidth.com. Much like Google Voice, we work with a plurality of vendors for redundancy, geographic coverage, etc..

Voxeo also works with Bandwidth.com. "Bandwidth.com shares Voxeo's 'All-IP' worldview and as a result is an important voice network partner for us." --Jonathan Taylor, Voxeo CEO

http://bandwidth.com/about/read/flexNetwork.html

So is the alternative/your expectation that they send each developer a custom email? If Twilio was to do that, that doesn't sound practical, scalable or smart.

The alternative would be to not include "RE:" in the subject, which makes it looks like a reply to an earlier thread. The subject is subject enough already. Don't manipulate it with a "RE:" to imply something more.

That said, I've been working with Twilio on and off for 2 years and have never received an email like this from them.

Looks like this is a bit of email usability fail on our part. When you first sign up for Twilio, you receive an email with the subject line "Welcome to Twilio... Learn to Build Your First Phone App in Less than 5 Minutes" and then 7 days later we send you an email introducing our CEO that says "RE: Welcome to Twilio..." in the subject line. The goal was that these would get threaded together, but they don't since the from is "Twilio" in the first and we use real names in the other emails (the one from Jeff says his name, the one from me says my name, etc.)

Sorry about that, it's an easy fix to remove the RE:

Thanks for addressing that.

Fair enough. The use of Re: is def a bit manipulative/not truly representative.

Interesting, maybe it's something they rolled out more recently for their newer members. I only started with them a couple months ago.

The alternative is that they don't lie about their content.

Personalization of this type is pretty common in marketing communications of all types (direct mail, emails, etc). Calling it a lie seems a stretch.

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