robwebb2k

I wasted about an hour of my life today trying to find an email address for customer service at Amazon.com’s Mechanical Turk. The “contact us” form on mturk.com generates this auto response:

Thanks for writing to us at Mechanical Turk.
Please note: This is an automated response, but it contains information that should help answer your questions. Please do not reply to this e-mail, as we are not able to respond personally to messages sent to this address. To better serve you, we’ve made it easy to find answers and make changes quickly and efficiently through our Web site. Why wait for an e-mail response when you can:

Find the answers to your questions in our online Help pages.
http://www.mturk.com/mturk/help?helpPage=main
View your account history, or make changes to your account.
http://www.mturk.com/mturk/youraccount

We hope you’ll find that your questions can be answered by using our online resources. If you’ve explored these links but still need to get in touch with us, you can find an e-mail form in our online Help department. We appreciate your business and look forward to seeing you again soon at Amazon.com.

Sincerely,
Amazon.com Customer Service
http://www.mturk.amazon.com/

Note the line buried in the middle: “If you’ve explored these links but still need to get in touch with us, you can find an e-mail form in our online Help department.” There’s no link given for the Help department…possibly because it doesn’t exist on mturk.com. To make matters worse, the central phone operators at Amazon have no idea what the Mechanical Turk is.

I eventually called a number I found on this site: Looking for the Amazon.com customer service phone number? I was finally able to speak to someone who looked up Mechanical Turk in their directory and gave me this email address: contactus@mturk.com

I haven’t gotten a response yet and maybe I never will, but at least I was able to get the satisfaction of sending the message into the abyss. The site above has the Paypal, e-Bay, Yahoo, and Netflix customer service numbers as well. They should start running some ads some ads!

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Edit: Boooo. I just got this, although it seems that there is a glimmer of hope that they may reply to the message I sent using their form:

This is an automatically generated Delivery Status Notification. Delivery to the following recipient failed permanently: contactus@mturk.com
Technical details of permanent failure:
TEMP_FAILURE: Could not initiate SMTP conversation with any hosts:
[mturk.com (1): Connection timed out]