I have just had a very frustrating process of dealing with Formlabs support from which one key lesson needs to be shared with the Formlabs user community.
Beware, if you have an issue with Formlabs, do not rely on emails to the support@formlabs.com address, even after you’ve received something from this address. You must add everything on the website against your support ticket (if you can - I wasn’t always able to) or state it publically in these forums.
It appears that all/many of my emails to this address, including when I pressed ‘reply’ in Outlook, were not received by Formlabs. Consequently, none of my comments and preferences were received and they could not respond as I requested. In the end, after 2 months of frustration and countless hassles, I received an email requesting whether I wanted a replacement Form1+ or my money refunded, for the Form 1 that I had not accepted. I replied stating I wanted the Form1+ as that had been my request all along, but next I heard was an email saying my money was refunded. Going back through the communication, it now becomes apparent that they had never actually responded to anything that I hadn’t entered in directly on the website. I have never received a failed delivery response, but that is not unusual these days.
This may be a rookie mistake, but I would have thought that if the reply address was valid (rather than using a noreply@etc email address) then emails would be received and actioned accordingly. That is how support works elsewhere.
Something I have discovered is that certain attachments can make an e-mail fail to make it to a recipient in Formlabs. I sent and received with good speed a few e-mails from a member of the support team. I then sent an e-mail with an attachment totalling a few MB and I got no response. I sent it again a few days later . . . . no response. I then sent an e-mail with no attachment asking if the mails had got through and very quickly got a reply that nothing had come in. Files were then transferred via another third party system to get the files to the recipient.
It may be that Formlabs could have a fairly tight filter on their mail server gateway restricting file types, file sizes, or some combination of these. It would be nice to know these gateway restrictions as this could be the problem. Such systems generally drop the e-mail and do not send a failure report to the sender. I know this because I have something on my business web site that restricts certain things, having said that I do tell people what these restrictions are on the web site!
If someone from Formlabs could confirm what is happening and if there are restrictions that would help greatly.
If there are no restrictions then they really should be looking at this black hole.
There were no attachments in any my emails, but I have had confirmation from Stephen in support that they were definitely not received. Apparantly, formlabs use a sophisticated software package for managing support emails. I propose that this isn’t working properly!
It has been about 1 week since I sent you an e-mail with photos from the prints with a new resin tray and new resin. Just wondering if you have received my e-mail. Should I resend?
Hello everyone, thank you for starting this thread and bringing the dropped email issue to our attention. I’ve been looking into this over the weekend and it seems that some emails are being filtered through our ticketing service as “spam”. We have implemented a fix for this and apologize for those of you who have been inconvenienced by this error.
Joanna - I’ve recovered your previous messages. It looks like Stephen is handling your ticket and replied to you last Wednesday regarding your request. Please let me know if you need anything else and we would be happy to accommodate.
Nigel - Anything over 20MB could cause problems, but we can always handle via drop box or some other service if a larger file needs to be sent.
Linda - I see Stephen is handling your ticket so you should be all set.
FYI the attachment files were 2.1MB. containing 4 STL files and a jpg image, so should have made it through the gateway.
I do know some filters can interrogate zip files and take actions based on their findings. Naturally I have no idea what you guys have going on at your end.
The file failed to arrive on 2 separate occasions.
