General[email protected]
Data protection[email protected] with PRIVACY in the subject
Security[email protected] with SECURITY in the subject
Reply timeTwo working days for a considered answer, not an automated acknowledgement
One inbox. A person reads it.
You will not find a form anywhere on this site, and its absence is a decision rather than an oversight. A form bolted onto static pages hands your details to a processor you never agreed to, or swallows the message without telling either of us. Email is the whole system. The thread stays in your sent folder, so the record of what you asked and when belongs to you as well as to us.
Four reasons to write, and what happens to each
A data platform enquiry
Describe the situation rather than the solution you think you need. What the platform runs on, what is going wrong, who is affected and what you have already tried. Better still, pick a number off your dashboard that you do not trust and send us that: we trace it back to the row it came from and mark where the chain breaks. Either way you get a written reply with an honest read on whether this is work we should take, normally within two working days.
A data protection or privacy request
Access, rectification, erasure, restriction, portability, objection or a withdrawal of consent under the UK GDPR. Open the subject line with the word PRIVACY. The statutory month runs from the day your message lands, and if identity has to be established first we will say what would settle it. Part 14 of the privacy notice works through the whole procedure.
A security report
Found something broken in these pages, or in anything else we have published? Tell us. Open the subject line with SECURITY, set out the steps that reproduce the defect, and leave us a fair window to ship a fix before going public with it. Nobody who reports a genuine issue in good faith, without reaching into other people's data, will be pursued for it. There is no paid bounty attached to that promise.
Anything legal or contractual
Notices under our terms, procurement and supplier onboarding paperwork, or formal correspondence. Part 12 of the terms of use names email as the route for a formal notice, and that is where anything time critical should go. Paperwork needing a wet signature is arranged in the same thread.
What makes a first email worth answering properly
None of this is compulsory. It is simply what turns a two line reply into a useful one.
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01
The shape of the platform
Which cloud, which warehouse or lakehouse, roughly how the data gets in, and roughly how many models or pipelines exist. Approximate is fine. We are trying to work out the scale of the problem, not audit you by email.
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02
The symptom, not the diagnosis
What actually goes wrong and who notices. Numbers that disagree between two reports, a job that fails weekly, a bill that jumped, a request you could not answer. The underlying cause is frequently somewhere other than where the pain shows up.
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03
What already exists
Whether there is version control, whether there are tests, whether anything is documented, and whether there is a person who owns the platform. A platform with none of these needs a different first engagement from one that has all four.
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04
Your constraints
Budget range, deadline, procurement requirements, security questionnaires, data residency rules. Telling us early that you can only buy from a certified supplier saves us both a fortnight, because we would then have to decline.
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05
No credentials, no personal data, no production extracts
Please do not attach live data, database credentials, API keys or anything containing personal data to a first email. If we need to look at something sensitive, we will agree a secure route and a written processing instruction first. An email inbox is not that route.
The reply, described honestly
- Who reads it
- A person at VIVAN LABS LTD. There is no chatbot, no ticketing system, no automated qualification sequence and no autoresponder. If you get no reply within five working days, the message did not arrive and it is worth sending again.
- How long we keep it
- Enquiry correspondence that does not become a client relationship is deleted after twenty four months. Correspondence that does become a client relationship is kept for the life of the contract and then for six years from the end of the financial year in which it ends, because UK company law requires accounting records to be retained for that long.
- What we do with your details
- We answer you. Nobody is enrolled in a mailing list, nothing is sold or passed to a third party for marketing, and no profile is built from what you write. Record 02 of the privacy notice traces that flow from your message through to the clock that eventually removes it.
- Whether we might say no
- Frequently. If the work is outside what we do, if the timeline is not achievable, if we think another kind of supplier would serve you better, or if we simply do not have the capacity, we will say so in the first reply rather than after three meetings.
- Complaints about how we handle your data
- Raise it with us first at [email protected]. If you are not satisfied you can complain to the Information Commissioner's Office, Wycliffe House, Water Lane, Wilmslow, Cheshire SK9 5AF, telephone 0303 123 1113, at ico.org.uk. You can go to the ICO without coming to us first.
Pick a number off your dashboard. We trace it.
[email protected]. Everything on this page routes to it, and the subject line prefix is the only thing that changes. A person reads it and answers within two working days.