A nearly instant gratification came in the response to the story about 3Com requiring all sorts of information from those who want to opt out from receiving its unsolicited e-mail promotions. Within hours of that story being posted, 3Com's online form demanding name, address, phone, etc. was replaced with a form that only asks for the e-mail address you want to unsubscribe. A very small victory, to be sure, particularly since it doesn't necessarily mean 3Com is changing its practices in terms of sending out the spam in the first place, but we'll take what we can get.

Many readers were curious about the outcome of the rather nightmarish tale about a Sears vacuum cleaner that was purchased online but not delivered. The next week I was contacted by a Sears district manager who offered to set things right with the reader and his wife. The reader has now received a credit on the purchase, and the district manager has identified how it happened. "The real root problem was lack of training for the store personnel involved," the district manager wrote. "The systems do have ways to void/correct any mistake that is made. While it would be much easier for me to blame the system I can't do that -- at a store level we goofed! I am using this as a training issue and will also be covering on a regional conference call so that all of my counterparts go back and verify as well. This is not a breakdown that we want another customer to experience."

Another episode where a reader's feedback helped the vendor identify the problem involved a recent Dell story. A reader had tried unsuccessfully for months to get all the media he had ordered with a Dell Inspiron 9400. A Dell spokesman contacted me after that story appeared and asked if he could talk to the reader about the problem, and the reader agreed. "We were able to resolve this issue," the Dell spokesman wrote me. "Last week, our support team sent him a copy of the Dell Media Experience CD, which is the last piece of software he needed. He also provided good feedback as to how we can mitigate these kinds of issues moving forward. I communicated that feedback to our product and manufacturing teams."

Now, I'd like to say we're batting a thousand in getting our readers' gripes fixed, but of course we're far from it. Just to take some stories of the same vintage as these three where we could reasonably hope to see some kind of response from the vendor, Ticketmaster is yet to change its atrocious privacy policy, Hughes DirecWay broadband service made no attempt to straighten out its billing errors, and none of the vendors whose dead pixel policies came in for criticism have stepped forth. We'll see, though -- perhaps if I continue to follow up, we can get more vendors to do the same.