On June 27, 2010, between 06:00am and 10:00am CST, our Development and Database teams will be performing several upgrades of the infrastructure that support Orbit.

Jun 16:

On June 13, 2010, between 01:00am and 02:00am CST, our Product Support team will perform a reboot of ******.**.***** which provides load balancing services to you.

1 hour later:

Today you received a maintenance notification dated for June 13, 2010. The incorrect message was sent out and the correct will be sent at approximately 2pm CST.

5 minutes later:

On June 20, 2010, between 06:00am and 10:00am CST, our Networking group will be performing code upgrades on ******.***** to resolve several bugs.

3 hours later:

We apologize for the recent notifications which have had incorrect information. The correct change window for this maintenance is from 00:01 to 05:00 CT rather than 6:00 to 10:00 CST as previously sent.

The correct text should have read:

On June 20, 2010, between 00:01am and 05:00am CT, our Networking group will be performing code upgrades on *****.***** to resolve several bugs.

Jun 18:

On June 27, 2010, between 06:00am and 10:00am CST, our Development and Database teams will be performing several upgrades of the infrastructure that support Orbit.

Jun 25:

On June 27, 2010, between 06:00am and 10:00am CST, our Development and Database teams will be performing several upgrades of the infrastructure that support Orbit.

Jul 9 and Jul 15:

Scheduled Maintenance
June 24, 2010

Jul 19:

Emergency Maintenance
July 20, 2010

Well, my first CRM emailing script sent same email to couple of customers 5 times before I realized something is wrong in my coding. Since that, I have extremely strict testing policy for every application which sends out mass emails.

The easiest way to do a quick test is replacing actual customer’s email address with special test accounts in the test mode and counting number of emails received as well as validating their contents (proof reading + %username% quick tag replacements and such).

It doesn’t take much time but prevents you from annoying your customers – “hey, what kind of IT company are they if they can’t even handle their own mass mailing properly?”