Mint.com let me down today...

I have been a loyal Mint.com user for over 2 years, and today I experienced a level of dissatisfaction with the service that surprised me.

 A little background:  At around 6:45am CST today (10/13/2010), I received an email with no message body or subject line from "Mint.com <stage-mini@mint.com>".  The message contained an single 1x1 pixel image that "phoned home" to mkt41.net - an email marketing firm that presumably tracks visits and message load statistics.  After a little Googling, I learned that Mint.com apparently sent a "flood of emails" the previous morning due to a "simple" misconfiguration of a test server "with no customer data".  Stephen Mann (Mint.com's Director - Customer Advocacy) assures us (other loyal users like me no doubt) that measures were being put in place to ensure this never happens again.

So when I received a second blank email - identical to the first - about 6 hours later, I was upset.  I then learned that many others had received a half dozen or more emails well after Stephen Mann's rather inadequate message.  As I re-read that message that Mann posted early on 10/13, I grew more upset as I saw clearly both the incompetence and the utter lack of professionalism represented in the content.  

Here are my two main issues with Mint.com/Stephen Mann's message:

• Stephen Mann's choice of language in posting "sorry for being annoying" and "We also apologize if we woke you up from your sleep! " indicates that he thinks he's managing the social presence for a brand new shiny web2.0 side project.  Mint.com manages the personal financial information for hundreds of thousands (millions?) of users.  Stephen Mann should take this more seriously.  Moreover, a $30million sale to Intuit should firmly signal (at least to Mint.com) that Mint.com has a greater responsibility to its userbase.  We should not be subject to amateurish mistakes like allowing a test server to communicate with the outside world.
• I believe Stephen Mann is either too incompetent to have correctly determined the technical details of the problem, or outright lied in this message.  If the mistake occurred on a test-system with "no customer data", how was the email delivered to my email address?  If the test system has access to my email address, what other detail exists in this environment?

My final concern is that not many people appear to be aware of this problem!  To my own tiny part, I have hooked the RSS feed for this utterly shameful feedback thread into twitterfeed.  Any updates to the forum will be pumped into my embarrassingly lonely twitter stream.

For shame Mint.com.  Cereal.

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