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Comment by dontdoxxme | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft loves sending emails with "Action required" in the subject, when actually no action is required, or it doesn't apply to you, or whatever. Such corporate speak. It's fun searching your email for "Action required" and finding all the things you were supposed to do and it turns out didn't need to do anything about.

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"Crying wolf" constantly like this is so frustrating. It waters down the message until they send something you really need to worry about, which you ignore like the rest of the pointless messages.

What marketing/sales/HR types don’t seem to understand is that when everything is the highest priority, nothing is.

This is a bit off topic, but I always say that priority is a ranking of actual demands, it is an ordering, one that needs curating and keeping updated based on context and changes in environment.

Nothing else works for prioritisation, any other categorising into "High/Medium/Low" just fails.

By doing so you end up with the nonsense we had at a company I once worked for, where stories were all put in medium.

This was because stories in low were simply never actioned, they'd never ever get done, everyone came to implicitly understand this. It was still a useful dumping ground for the kinds of stories you know you ought to do, but no-one wanted to do, but it was useful to have noted on record. But for prioritising actual work, it was useless.

Stories in High had a special process defined in a handbook that no-one wanted the hassle of dealing with.

So everything was Medium.

This had obvious problems, and it grew larger than could be managed.

So "Just Above Medium" was born, for stories that were higher priority than your everyday stories in Medium.

This in time grew too, so "Just Above Just Above Medium" (aka JAJAM) was born.

By the time I started, there was even a "JAJAM+" category, for stories that had to be fast-tracked through the process too.

The whole thing essentially fell back to having the product/development leads come to an understanding of what work needed to be done. Which is the right way to do it, but that should simply be made more explicit and part of the process by simply having all stories ranked.

Then you don't need the mental overhead of trying to decide in a design meeting if something is "Just above Medium" or just above that...

But it is MY highest priority!

I saw someone had an idea to have a ticket system where the user chose the priority, and it displaced the current ticket at that priority, with the catch being that this ticket was sent back to the user with "are you sure?"

CEO can't login during a demo. Sandra from accounting can't print from the closest printer and confirmed this is higher priority

Currently having this issue, two critical tickets.

Ticket A: Elevated Response times for Server A outside of allowed tolerance, people experiencing timeouts

Ticket B: Change the colour of a button

I wish Ticket B Submitter could see the ticket before them to gauge what critical actually means.

This is why the user can’t be trusted to assign severity. Incentives across teams aren’t aligned and they don’t have visibility into other issues even if they were aligned.

Early on in my career my manager told me "a monitoring system that sends more than a dozen notifications a day actually sends zero notifications". Words to live by.

I can’t imagine a life in which I would have to worry about an email Microsoft sends me. But it doesn’t sound pleasant.

I unfortunately took part in their startup program. I was awarded the credits. However, I noticed that everything was super pricey, especially the AI services and the azure interface is basically garbage. It is very easy for you to enable a service and never be able to find it later until you have been billed for it later in the month. Maybe the GCP interface has spoilt me too much.

Long story short: I discontinued their program and it's been 2 years and I still receive those action required emails only to find out that there is absolutely no action required on my side. Harassing users is their favorite past time I swear. Ask the Github desktop folks. On Mac OS, there is no option to disable automatic updates. It loves installing a helper that runs 24/7 with admin privileges. If you click on deny, it will keep harassing you - every. single. day. First thing in the morning - 3 times, 3 times in the evening. You could be in the middle of something important, like a meeting or a screen share or running some serious stuff like CNC milling (which I do) and this thing will just popup and ask you for admin privileges until you accept.

And even if you accept and give it permissions, it just buys you a few days time. People have tried before to open an issue on Github - their response was simply "This isn't a priority for us right now" and they just closed the issue.

Same story with Windows too. I wish there was a law to prevent this kind of bullying behaviour.

I think the laws would need to be generally around not hindering competition. If competition were high, and you had a dozen operating systems to choose from, then you’d move away from this annoying one (Windows). And thus Windows would have a lower incentive to engage in this behavior. But current laws don’t discourage monopolies/oligopolies.

My spam folder is full of "Action Required" emails. So many of them are phishing attempts that I would never even open such an email even if it really truly came from Microsoft.

I once filed a support ticket against one of those emails because I couldn't figure out what they were telling us to do.

Even MS's staff couldn't figure out what resources the "Action Required" email had to do with.

I was told by awareness training that e-mails titled "Action required" are phishing mails.

I love the idea that everyone in this thread is complaining about phishing emails, thinking they came from Microsoft.

Google famously just did this with their Captcha service. Had lots of people signing up for a more complicated version on Google Cloud that they didn't need to do.

At that point I would rather sign up for CloudFlare's captcha service. I already use them for some of my websites.

Because it absolves them of liability of anything goes wrong. They can point to the email say "we warned you". Having to filter and target the specific set of customers that a notice applies to carries risk and costs to them and they wanna pass it to you.

Same with GCP. I have Private test account with nothing on it. I get emails about actions being required regarding APIs I have never used, a few times per year.

You’ll typically only get that for APIs that are enabled in one of your projects. That’s a bit different - those emails are strictly for technical changes that are actually necessary if you’re affected, it’s not part of any sort of marketing scheme.

That's actually a good case for a LLM going through it and deciding: "nah, overblown" and "Oh, yeah, this one can close the account"

No actually it's the worst case

I literally have a rule to automatically mark as read any email that has "important update" in the subject, because 99% of these "important updates" are various types of inconsequential "lawyers made us do this" bullshit.

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