Customer service

I ran into a technical issue on equipment I am not familiar with. I looked in the manual for clues to an error code and it suggested to contact the manufacturer. I chose to send an email because due to the noisy environment calling was not an option.

The first response from SEW Eurodrive: since I am not a "trusted contact" of theirs, I need to take action:

I used the email address that is publicly listed on their website. So I played the game and hit "reply" and "send". The reply seemed to suggest I was getting somewhere.

Finally an answer to my call for tech support... Or not?

Because I received this lovely out-of-office reply:

This type of automated response is probably the most useless type of email, immediately following unsolicited email. To require a customer to take action so that his email is actually delivered seems the wrong answer to spam prevention to me.

In this case, if there is only one person responding to calls for tech support via email, that may indicate something about the company.