I'm all for helping out a bro and all of these excuses are valid explanations of common reasons why companies don't answer emails in a timely fashion, but...

In this day and age, any company interested in doing international business has no excuse for blocking foreign email domains. Furthermore, n company interested in staying in business has any excuse for not answering all emails within 24 hours with a quality response.

If a company hasn't figured out by now that the Internet...more specifically social networking sites...is where their buyers are getting most of their information, and that about 40% of all commerce is now conducted electronically, then they're WAY behind the curve and probably on the way out.

Unfortunately, there are a LOT of companies in the fly fishing industry like that. But there are some that are right up there on the cutting edge of info tech, too. We'll see who is left standing in a few more years if the old dawgs don't learn some new tricks.

THE standard of customer service for email is a 24-hour response time.