We removed the ability to initiate a new support thread via email to reduce the amount of time we have to spend figuring out who somebody is. Customers were regularly writing in from various email addresses and not including enough information for us to figure out who they are. That resulted in wasted time for us and for them.

The suggested workaround of using an older case ID would work for a relatively recent support thread, but we do automatically 'close' threads after there has been no activity for awhile.

You have a good point about cases when the web panel is down. It should be noted, though, that we use the web panel ourselves constantly all day long while providing support and it would be a very rare case indeed for us to not notice. Additionally any situation that would take the web panel down entirely is almost definitely going to be deeper in the system and affect a lot more functionality than just the web panel, further increasing the likelihood that we would already know.

That said, never say never, right? The web panel does go down sometimes, and if you do submit a 'sales question' through the contact form on the dreamhost.com website that ends up going into the same queue as all other support requests. It's color-coded as the type of question it is but those questions are viewable by the same set of support techs.


This isn't to say things couldn't be better, but re-allowing all support requests to come in via email isn't a workable solution unfortunately.



- Dallas
- DreamHost Head Honcho/Founder