Smokingpipes.com uses email:

Email is one of the more foundational aspects of how we communicate with our customers. We consider your email address to be private and confidential and will not share it with anyone outside of our organization. We hate spam as much as, if not more than, you do! So we want to make sure that the email that we do send you is pertininent, important, and deliverable. We know that your email box is flooded with spam (ours is, too). We know that you and your ISP are trying to take steps to minimize the amount of spam you receive (so are we!) and we would like to offer a little help by letting you know what to expect.

When you ask a question:

On just about every product page on our website you will find a link that allows you to "Ask a question about this...". Using this link will invoke your email client and send an inquiry to info@smokingpipes.com. We try to answer all inquiries quite promptly (sometimes within mere seconds!). It would help out tremendously if you would "unblock" this email address from any challenge/response or spam filtering program. When we receive an automated "Hi! Are you a spammer?" message from an ISP, our ISP tends to think that the challenge message is spam, as well. The net result is that we do not know if our message got through, you get frustrated because you think we are ignoring you, and both of us have wound up increasing email volume that is really going nowhere.

When you place an order:

We are very grateful for the confidence and trust that you place in us when you order merchandise from our establishment. When you place an order, you will receive a machine generated acknowledgement of your order from orders@smokingpipes.com. Again, when we receive an automated "Hi! Are you a spammer?" message from an ISP, our ISP tends to think that the challenge message is spam and tosses it. We send a confirmation, your ISP rejects the message with a challenge, our system may think that the challenge is spam, you don't get the confirmation and are left wondering what's going on. Please unblock this address beforehand.

UPS will send you a message:

For almost all domestic shipments, we utilize UPS. We do this for a variety of very sound and important reasons. The UPS shipping system ties in directly to our website, UPS tracking services are far superior to anything else that we have evaluated, and their service is extremely dependable. When we send a package out via UPS, you will receive an email from UPS the same evening that the package goes out, usually around 5:00pm Eastern. This notification will come from QuantumViewNotify@ups.com, and will contain links to detailed tracking information as well as your package ID number and estimated delivery date. If you wish to receive this notification, you'll need to make sure that you are able to receive it.

Smokingpipes.com does not send spam:

Each time you place an order with us, you are given the opportunity to select whether you would or would not like to receive our weekly newsletters. Our newsletter gives you a snapshot of what is new at the shop and what is available. If you decide that you do not want to receive it, we'll stop sending it immediately. All you need to do is send an email to remove@smokingpipes.com. A link to the remove address is also provided in every newsletter that we send.

Occasionally, you may receive spam that looks like it came from us. This is called "spoofing" and is not done by anyone here at Smokingpipes.com. Spammers will send out millions of emails that flog stock, pills, mortgages, or whatever, and use one of our email addresses as the apparent sender. There's really not a lot we can do about this. There are a variety of reasons why one of our email addresses can show up in the sender portion. The two most common ways are that one of our email addresses is "scraped" off of our website and copied into the spam or one or more of our customer's computers is infected with a virus or worm that winds up sending spam out in the name of email addresses randomly pulled out of the address book. Again, it's not really us doing this and we apologize if it looks like we've opened a few sideline businesses (we haven't).