Arbitration / Training
The Training Course for Case Managers and Arbitrators
Lesson 19 - Arbitration - Communication problems
CCA 3.5 Communication
- Notifications to you are sent by CAcert to the primary email address registered with your account. You are responsible for keeping your email account in good working order and able to receive emails from CAcert.
- Arbitration is generally conducted by email.
This means, if an Arbitrator cannot receive an arbitration participant by email, the member is probably running into a CCA violation.
Experiences
However, we did experienced several communication problems in the past
- email did not receive the recipient caused by email system misconfigurations (routing problems)
- email did not receives the recipient caused by spam and antivirus filters incl. greylisting filter (technical filter issues)
- email did not receive the recipient caused by incompatibility between sender and receiver MTA's (technical MTA issues)
Solutions and workarounds
To workaround these problems, there are a few solutions that may circumvent the found problems.
- If you do not receive a response within a week, try sending a reminder
- If the reminder still keeps unanswered, ask the CM/A (the 2nd party) to forward your email request to the member
- If this doesn't work or you'll receive a NDR, contact Support to search for a secondary email address in the users account you can use to contact the member -or- try to find other contact informations through a website, through find-an-assurer listing, through informations given in dispute filing or other sources. Its likely once your email passes to the member the source of the problem in contacting the member will discover one of the issues given under experiences
Examples
- One arbitrator sends several emails to a member to receive a response regarding init mailing and CCA acceptance. The arbitrator runs out of luck. No NDR, no response from the member. After 3 months, the CM tried to send a reminder to the member, and the remember responded within 24 hours - no email received from the arbitrator before
- Another arbitrator tried to contact a user to receive a statement regarding running case. The arbitrator received a NDR. The email address relates to a user driven DNS domain. The website to the DNS domain lists another email address. Once the member was contacted, he responded, that the email domain runs out of service and the user switched the email domain. He did forget to also switch the primary email address in his CAcert account. Contact established. Problem solved.
- In a third case, the Find-an-Assurer displayed another email address, that assurees can use to contact the assurer. This email address differed to the primary email address set in the members account. Using this email address, the member has been contacted and the member responded, never received an email to his primary email account within a 24 hours period.
- An Arbitrator tried to contact a member. No response, no NDR. After 1 week, the arbitrator sends a reminder. The member responded within 24 hours, that he didn't received an email before, didn't find the emails in his spam folder, nor didn't find any records in his mail gateway logs.
- An Arbitrator tried to contact a member. No response, no NDR. After 1 week, the arbitrator sends a reminder. The member responded within 24 hours. Checking his spam folder he founds the arbitrator sends 1 week ago.
Despite the fact, that CCA 3.5 Communications defines a simple and clear rule, its helpful to rethink the annoying behaviour situation. From an early communities rule (20 years and ago)
- Thou shalt not excessively annoy others.
- Thou shalt not be too easily annoyed.
the unresponsiveness of a member doesn't really mean that the member doesn't respond (how can a user respond to an email he'll never received?). So its in the arbitrators decision if he rules a member offending CCA 3.5 communications or not in a case, where technical problems prevents the communication to the member.
If all possible solutions have been worked through and the member doesn't respond, it can be considered that the user really doesn't want to respond caused by other ways and therefore violates CCA 3.5 Communications
To ask the Case Manager to resend a request, or to ask Support for a 2nd email address of an user are easy ways that might solve the communications problem.
Questions
- Is it possible, despite the fact a member keeps his email account in a good working order, that emails by CAcert didn't receive the member?
- Which issues may causes communication problems?
Review