On responses to email

I really do quite like it when I see people and organisations acting professionally. I also get quite annoyed when I see them not bothering to do so. Being a geek, I see a lot of this through the Web, and often get in touch with a short (generally fairly friendly) note to let people know if they could do with improving their service (or indeed, if they're already providing a great one).

I have, however, noticed quite a disparity in the replies I get. I'd have thought that the ones I send positive feedback to would just nod and get on with their work. The ones I send negative feedback to would immediately look into the problem, take some positive action and get back to me with an apology and a listing of how they intend to improve.

As you might have guessed, that's not always what happens. Here's some key culprits:

People failing with mailing lists
Here's an example - today I got an email which was sent to all undergraduates in the school of engineering and applied science at Aston. There's a perfectly good seas_ug mailing list which would hide all of the addresses the message was sent to. Alternatively, there's always the 'bcc' field. However, this mailer chose to put all ~2000 email addresses into the 'to' field, for any enterprising student to harvest and sell/abuse.

I sent a link to the Data Protection Act to the offender, and some kindly advice about how to use mailing lists and email in general. Based on past experience of sending similar emails, I'm near certain I won't get a response.

Edit: What're the odds? They replied a couple of hours later. This is literally the first time someone's replied to such an email. Their excuse of 'incompetence' wasn't really too reassuring though, especially as the damage has already been done. They seem a nice enough person though.

Recruitment agencies/departments
I've been applying for some jobs recently. Some of the companies have unbelievably awful processes - I actually decided not to go for one particular job because their recruitment process is that bad. If they don't care enough about quality to at least glance at what they're putting live, I don't think I want to work there. I won't name names, as the agency which put up that tat is also processing some of my other applications at the moment.

For the companies that have been particularly awful (or particularly good) I've sent some communication outlining this, and suggesting simple methods for improvement. The good feedback has gotten me a 100% response, whereas the negative has gotten me a 0% response. Presumably if they're so unprofessional they put that kind of application process live, they're also unprofessional enough not to care.

People putting information online in proprietary formats
Hint: Not everyone has a copy of Microsoft Office installed. Yes, I'm aware there are sub-par tools I can use to get a rough idea of the content of your .docx, but if you put one up online you can expect an email asking for an open document type.

Feedback (and a document anyone can read) is about 50% from people I email with this one. Although, that's dropping since I started mailing recruitment agencies that are (shudder) using .dot templates to, presumably, automatically extract data into their Access databases. Classy. Remember that these are technology companies that I'm applying to.

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Right, enough bitching. Time to go back to coursework..