I recently signed up for Adobe’s Creative Cloud service. As an owner of CS3 Web Premium I’m now paying 30 Euros a month for what basically is the Master Collection plus two additional apps exclusively available in the Creative Cloud package (Muse and Edge). A pretty good deal if you ask me.
Today I get this email:
My first thought: This looks like spam. An email with just a PDF file in it? Usually, it’s not a good idea to click that PDF (or any PDF from an unknown source), especially if you’re still using Adobe’s own security-flaw-ridden Reader (I’m not). But since I’d signed up for Creative Cloud, the email could also have been perfectly genuine. It’s just not obvious from looking at it.
So I looked at the email’s headers and, sure enough, the SMTP servers involved in the delivery of the email were all .adobe.com. So, after another couple of seconds of doubt, I clicked the PDF and it opened in Preview. It was in fact the monthly invoice for Creative Cloud.
This experience left me shaking my head at Adobe’s total obliviousness regarding how this email will look to their customers. The sender email address is totally unknown to me (probably belongs to the server-side software that generates the invoices) and the email contains no obvious clues whatsoever as to who is sending me this email. Usually, that’s a surefire sign for spam or malware. Would it really be so hard to include some boilerplate text in there along with a full signature? I make it a point to include my full company contact and legal info in commercial email correspondence (it’s even a requirement in Germany). Surely, if I can do that, Adobe should be able to modify their little invoice-sending bot script to make it easier for their customers to identify a legitimate email from Adobe.
Potentially Related
- What to do if you’re not getting emails from Twitter
- Stephen M. Hackett on the Mac App Store
- The downside of free services
