commercial e-mail, problem database (was:Hot line)

[Reinhard Doelz]

1.) concerning the commercial aspects of INTERNET usage: 
I hope that support is a little bit more than sales and 
advertising. As far as I know the rules, research must 
be involved in the subject of transmitted messages, or at 
least support research activities. Even though I 
see your point saying that you are a commercial company, I 
think that an email hotline would be directly supporting 
researchers thus permitting you to use the INTERNET. 

2.) What about setting up an 'iris-maintenance' email adress which could 
be accessed as database? Provided that the people 
asking for support agree, their problems could be 
made available (anonymously if needed) including the 
answer given by the support. Quite often I meet problems which are 
answered with replies like  like 'will be in the next release' or so. 

The release notes of the OS need to be accumulated somewhere at SGI.
As soon as an entry is completed, it were easy for SGI to inform customers 
by spreading the news. 

Normally, the problems are not that site-specific and 
a database of questions and answers were quite helpful to 
me. OK, you're using an HP box. But a simple thing were to 
have a log number attach to each incoming problem by the 
mailer program and send out the answers to a bouncing list referring 
to that number.

Reinhard