customer with no email address

[earth-friendly]

Once in a while, I will get a customer who will call in to place an order, and believe it or not, they have no email address. Does anyone have any suggestions on how best to handle these types of customers in oscmax?
I had a weird idea--don't know if this makes sense.
I was thinking of entering a bogus email address for such a customer, like,
firstname.lastname@nonexistentdomain.com
If I wanted to, I could check before certain email confirmations are sent out, to not send them out if the email domain is nonexistentdomain.com. Or I could just let them bounce.
(Or I could use the domain of my website.)

Does this idea make sense, or does anyone have any better way to handle these types of customers?

I'm planning to install the Master Password contribution, so if someone has ordered before and has no email address, I'd just login with the master password.

Thanks for any suggestions!
-Lori-

[jpf]

Suggest you don't use a domain that you don't own. MYDOMAIN.COM and YOURDOMAIN.COM and many others gets up to tens of thousands of mails (plus HTTP, HTTPS that don't exist plus invalid FTP, SQL and other connection request) per hour - JUST because people don't think anyone owns them - or because there is no default web page....

It also begs the question as how they found out about your web based product/business? If word of mouth - GREAT! If they JUST don't want to use there email - then suggest HOTMAIL/YAHOO/MAIL.COM/GMAIL etc... Or use the Purchase without an account option.

If legitimate then I would suggest creating an full account for them with noemail@whateveryourdomainis.com with a default password you use on all these account...

[earth-friendly]

jpf, Thanks for the response!
These are actually legitimate calls. I have a fiber product that I sell, and I send flyers to doctors, so they refer their patients to me. Some of them may be older people who don't have email addresses. It's also true that I get some people who just don't want to give me their email addresses, so for those, I could suggest they create a free email address, just so they can get the email confirmations of their orders.

For the customers with no email addresses, you suggested creating an account for them at noemail@whateveryourdomainis.com (I know, for my real domain).
But there is a limit of 5 addressbook entries for an account, so I thought I'd need to use firstname.lastname@whateveryourdomainis.com, so I have a unique account for each of these users.
Were you suggesting that I actually create the email account for the customer, or just let any email bounce?

Or, I guess I could do Purchase Without Account, and create a single email address that I use for all of them. But if I have repeat customers, I'd have to retype their information each time.

Thanks again,
-Lori-

[MindTwist]

You ever heard of a catch-all email account?

I have several domains that have only one real email address, like me@domain.com , and then have a catch-all set up on that domain pointing to me@domain.com.

That basically means that all emails received to non existing emails addresses on that domain is redirected to me@domain.com. If you were to email mindtwistfansclub@domain.com , I would get that email too.

It is very useful for many purposes, like signing up to a web site. I sign up here, and use oscmax@domain.com as email address, which will get to me. The day oscmax sells my email address to some spammers, I will know who has done it, since I am using a different email address everywhere I sign up. I will also be able to create a dummy email account then as oscmax@domain.com , so all email received there gets redirected to /dev/null

Now, to the point, you can also use that to create as many customer accounts as you want to your store. Mr. John Doe wants to buy something, but doesn't even use email? Create john.doe@domain.com and do the purchase on that account. You can create as many accounts/emails as you need, and I would just put a default password on all those accounts.

It does seem a good solution to make it this way...

[earth-friendly]

Thanks MindTwist! I think that will work for me.
My original concern with doing something like that, is that I started getting lots of spam and bounced email--people were spoofing email using my domain, and automatically generated "from" addresses, so I set things up so that email to all unknown addresses at my domain would go to /dev/null.
However, I do have some other domains that I've never used for email, so I could use one of those domains for all these customers, and have all email addresses go to a particular email address at that domain.

Thanks both jpf and MindTwist for the helpful suggestions!

-Lori-

[MindTwist]

Spam is not really an issue for me, at least for now.

I am using Thunderbird and the spam filters seem to be more than enough for me, they rarely let any spam messages go through, and I have a few hundred spam emails trashed every day. If you do not have a good anti spam setup that solution could be a problem, yeah.

[met00]

or, set up a gmail account... then forward all the unknown@domain.com to the gmail account. let gmails spam filter do the rest.

[MindTwist]

Don't know for sure, but I think that Mozilla Thunderbird must use the same spam filtering that Gmail uses. I had always used Eudora until maybe 3 years ago, and once I tried Thunderbird I never looked back. I even got Spam Assassin removed from my email servers, and now I let Thunderbird do the job...

[jpf]

Using a flyer and Word of mouth - very good!

All my domains have a CATCH all email address - sent that thought a SPAM filer - Just to sort out the real spam from the real emails - leaving me just a few "not sure" emails... Actually I get very few spam emails that is like "random_names@yourdomain.com".....

Set up a fiter that anything that contains in the "from/sender" the string "@yourserver.com" - put that into a folder call "CASH WEB SALES"

Then you have no problem with keeping track of things. AND when they do come on line - then it is a mater of "reseting" the email and password...

Good Luck!

[earth-friendly]

Thanks again to JPF, MindTwist and met00 for all the helpful suggestions.

I realize it has been quite a while since we discussed this issue, but I've come up with a related question. Once in a while, someone will mail me an order with a check. Or, there are a couple of people that I charge wholesale prices instead of retail. What I'd like to do is to enter those orders in as usual, but I'd like to enter the payment as "Cash on Delivery". 99.99% of my orders will be entered as Credit Card Via Authorize.net. So that is the only option I want available for most of the world. Is it possible to have Cash on Delivery only show up under certain circumstances? Or, should I enter these types of orders through the admin? I'd like to avoid entering orders through the admin if possible, since I don't think it calculates any discounts.

Thanks,
-Lori-