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Comment by barbazoo | Hacker News Reader

> It's pretty shameful that these large companies have no real way to contact them.

Along the same lines, I think organizations shouldn't be allowed to send out email but not receive email at the same address, e.g. noreply@. That's just hostile in general.

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I fully agree that it is shameful that we can't contact these companies, but suppose you want to send 2fa tokens as a startup. Should you not be allowed to offer 2fa through email unless you're at a scale where you can answer every reply email?

> Should you not be allowed to [send email at all, for any reason] unless you're at a scale where you can answer every reply email?

Hell yeah. Don't threaten me with a good time.

Philosophically I don't disagree, but in reality the likely effect of a rule like this would be even greater empowerment to the incumbents, which are mostly huge tech companies. Maybe it doesn't matter since the vast majority of startups don't mind be equally abusive, and often have an exit strategy in mind of getting acquired by huge tech, so hell it might even be a net positive in some ways. However, this would also have the net effect of ensuring that ethical startups seeking to disrupt gross entrenched practices would be dead before they can even start. Given the direciton the tech cos have already long demonstrated they want to go, that strikes me as a much bigger evil than not having access to customer support

You definitely shouldn't be accepting payments without a way for someone to get in touch to say "hey you're overcharging me / double charging me / I want my money back"

If your service is free than I don't think anyone is entitled to customer support, since there aren't really customers in the first place

On this we totally agree, but I don't see that distinction made in GP or GGP comments so just wanted to note that this isn't a full reinforcement of GGP comment

2FA via E-Mail is not 2FA.

Sure, I don't disagree, but that seems an entirely different discussion. If it bothers your OCD, replace 2FA tokens with "confirm your email address" or some other thing. If you don't think there are ever any good reasons for sending a customer email, then we'd have to step back and argue that first before we could get to my question in the GP post

Why do they need to know if the email address is valid if they’re never going to accept email from me in the first place?

So your startup is also ignoring info@ and postmaster@ and ...

You would impose the rule after a certain threshold.

It could even be quite high, like $100 million or $1 billion in annual revenue.

If you do that, its incredibly easy to get around instructions by contracting out to a tiny "company" that's actually just shell corporation #6485 and say they sent it.

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