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The Bat: Great program, terrible documentation and support

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JavaJones:
J-Mac, that story about Postbox "customer relations" is stunning! Wow. Sounds like good riddance though. Makes me not feel so bad about Google's lackadaisical attitude toward Gmail support. :D

- Oshyan

Darwin:
Wow! That is quite a story, Jim! At least they gave you your money back... Despite the refund, this is not a good way to go about fostering warm, cuddly feelings toward your company and product! Quite "holier than thou" about it, from the snippet of their e-mail that you quoted. What I don't understand is the "no opposing view will be tolerated" attitude. I haven't read you posts on their forums (obviously) but if all you were doing was pointing out bugs and deficiencies it suggests that far from not liking their software you like it enough to want development and improvement to go forward. Sheesh!

J-Mac:
Yeah, for example: on an existing thread a lot of posts had already been made requesting the same thing, a fairly common feature. If Postbox's junk filter automatically marks a message as "Junk" and sends it to the Junk folder, and the user recognizes it as a false positive and marks it as "Not Junk" it should go back to the Inbox automatically. In Postbox it didn't; it just stayed in the Junk folder and it was up to the user to manually move it back. The only Postbox comment was that it was the accepted way that junk mail is treated, as if that behavior is the industry standard. I posted and pointed out the many well-known and respected email clients that moved it back to the Inbox automatically, as opposed to Postbox's behavior. Postbox just reiterated their previous comment, so I pointed out that they were the founders of Thunderbird and that they designed Thunderbird to auto-move junk marked as Not-Junk back to the Inbox; I might have also wondered which other clients used the behavior they claimed was "standard". They didn't like that. But they had allowed the non-feature to stand as "normal" for so long I didn't just want to add another "me, too!" post. There were a few other poor "features" that I suggested fixes for that they apparently didn't want to fix. A problem may have been that after I would question something a number of others would join in, and the PB folks seemed to be accustomed to their users not questioning any design features.  Oh well.

Thanks!

Jim

superboyac:
Seems to me that these email applications are not being very customer friendly because there just probably aren't that many customers.  Hardly anyone uses email clients anymore, other than Outlook.  So for me to ask for a lot of feature requests, it's probably a futile effort.  Their profits are probably not very high, so they just sustain the program minimally for existing users.  I'm sure if all the people using the webmail were also using clients, we would notice much better customer support.

But nobody uses email clients anymore.  Just look around.  People use Outlook, probably because they have to for work, but the very large majority of people are using the webmail: gmail, hotmail, yahoo.

timns:
Seems to me that these email applications are not being very customer friendly because there just probably aren't that many customers.  Hardly anyone uses email clients anymore, other than Outlook.  So for me to ask for a lot of feature requests, it's probably a futile effort.  Their profits are probably not very high, so they just sustain the program minimally for existing users.  I'm sure if all the people using the webmail were also using clients, we would notice much better customer support.

But nobody uses email clients anymore.  Just look around.  People use Outlook, probably because they have to for work, but the very large majority of people are using the webmail: gmail, hotmail, yahoo.
-superboyac (March 10, 2011, 08:52 AM)
--- End quote ---

I think that depends very, very heavily on who you're looking at. Anyone who uses email for, or at, their real work, is likely to still lean towards a standard desktop email application. Of course this is entirely subjective, but I do a great deal of remote assistance and I don't think I've seen a single desktop within a medium or large company that did not have Outlook or Lotus Notes installed.

But I actually agree with you to some extent - if you're a tiny email application provider, your market is dwindling. And in the same marketplace as Outlook and Thunderbird, there's not much pie left.

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