AndreaL's dashboard

Thanks, Martin, for tackling this so quickly, and for giving it your all. Much appreciated! – Eric Suesz, on May 17, 2008 07:46

Scott,

Of course we can deal with floods and duplicates on our end, and we have ways to detect and handle them, they're just not perfect yet. I understand that you are frustrated with the situation, but I'd like to remind you of the following:

- we did not cause the problem
- our service is in private beta, which means that subsystems such as automatic duplicate detection are not 100% effective yet
- we responded within minutes of the support request, and offered a solution, which we promptly acted upon
- we are providing you with an explanation of what happened, and offered to provide even more details in a call

If you have suggestions on how we should have responded to this incident in a non-disappointing manner, please let us know and we'd be happy to improve your support experience.

Regards,
Martin

You also could architect your software to store the last message received from a carrier/user, and then compare the next message to that one ... if they are identical then discard the messages until you see some new message that you have not seen before. In addition, you could begin to detect a stream like this as being very unlikely to be coming from a valid user. You could be using this especially since you do not yet have a SMS/Text relationship with Verizon.

There are numerous ways in software to throttle this behavior, and to detect situations like this. To blame Verizon, and attempt to say there is nothing you can do about it is avoiding the issue, and seems to put in question the abilities of your developers. Sure ... Verizon might be flooding your system with bogus e-mails (something that I think YOU would want to take up with them, instead of pushing this off onto me!), but I am absolutely sure that your developers could come up with even more solutions than I have mentioned to detect, and effectively deal with, this type of situation.

We look forward to improvements in your code as you continue to grow your new business!

Andrea's husband ... Scott

Andrea,
I've put in a filter on our end to deal with it. I'd be happy to give you a call to give you some background info on what the problem is, so that you can provide the right information to Verizon. Let me know if that's cool.

Martin

It stopped now ... did you turn it off? (Real time chat would be a better to handle this type of thing!)

Andrea,
I understand your frustration, but the problem isn't on our end, it lies with Verizon. Over the last hour, we've been receiving continuous emails from yournumber@vtext.com, and we're just handling the requests as expected. Verizon's message sending seems to be stuck in a loop (it's not the first time).

I can temporarily deauthorize your account until you can figure this out with Verizon. Please let me know how you would like to proceed.

Martin

I just got 7 more messages in the last couple of minutes ... are you going to reply or respond in any way? What kind of attack is this? Why are you not giving me any way to stop this!! I just got two more while typing this!!!

I've rebooted my phone twice now ... and your messages are continuing to flood in ... why are you not stopping your system from sending me text messages!?!?!?!?!?!?

Now your stupid software is hammering my phone with non-stop messages saying "You checked in @ Salt Lake City, UT ..." and then "Sorry but we didn't understand you ..." ... repeating over and over and overt and over and over ...

TURN IT OFF!!