Wow, I rarely participate on the list anymore (mostly just monitor), but
I've been using IMail for about 4.5 years, and gone through the many
upgrades and patches during that time period, and been on this list, it
seems like, forever. And my biggest complaint with Ipswitch has always been
that their tech support is the worst I've ever seen (non-responsive, lacking
product knowledge, rude). If you report a bug that they can't resolve, they
will never respond to your e-mails to support. I once had to go all the way
to the president of Ipswich to get a problem resolved and then he got John
Junod (vice president of research and development) personally involved and
finally got the problem resolved.
It was a major pain having to go this route to even get acknowledgement of
the problem and it took weeks before I ever got a response from anyone, and
then it was a response from the president of Ipswitch, Roger Greene. I
don't recommend that everyone go this route, but someone at an executive
level needs to be made aware of our frustrations with tech support and their
"deaf-ear syndrome", and with the product, in general. The fact that they
sell their product on its feature set, then can't and won't support it, is
appalling! I guess the place to start with complaints is with Eric
Shanbrom, director of technical services:
http://www.ipswitch.com/Company/Press_Releases/000717_Shanbrom.html
and then work your way up the chain to Roger Greene, President of Ipswich,
if you don't get resolution along the way.
Mark, good luck on your quest to get some resolve to your issues here.
Please keep all of us on the list posted on your progress. I hope that you
have better luck than many of us have had in the past--changing products is
a drastic, and hopefully unnecessary, move (we'll see). I am always hopeful
that things are changing for the better at Ipswitch, but it is these kinds
of continued complaints that lead me to believe that it is a corporate
culture problem, and that's a problem that's hard to overcome.
Bill Landry
Director, Network Services
Pointshare
-----Original Message-----
From: Mark McDonald [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]
Sent: Friday, August 25, 2000 4:11 AM
To: '[EMAIL PROTECTED]'
Cc: '[EMAIL PROTECTED]'; '[EMAIL PROTECTED]';
'[EMAIL PROTECTED]'; '[EMAIL PROTECTED]'
Subject: RE: [IMail Forum] Fw: "cocky" support - IPSWITCH, PLEASE READ
THIS
Hi Patrick/Ipswitch,
I don't know why it needs to come down to this, but we're starting
to look for alternatives to replace IMail on our mail servers due to the
lack of support/fixes for *known* bugs that have went untouched for over 6
months (unacceptable for businesses that depend on email). I don't
understand why IPSwitch continues to work so hard on new releases without
first fixing the major bugs in the old versions.
We purchased IMail v5.0 and shortly after that v6.0 came out
introducing even more bugs. I never thought I'd say this but IMail is more
buggy than any Microsoft Product. Microsoft will fix something if it
becomes public and is a big problem, yet hundreds and thousands of messages
go through the IMail forums about these problems with no resolutions. Why
haven't the following *major* problems been fixed in the last 6-8 months:
* IMail needs to block users from adding 50 aliases if this will
crash the server (which it does). It's ridiculous to hear from support
that "It's designed to crash after 50 aliases are added, it's your
responsibility to make sure the domain host admins don't add more
than 50 aliases". That is a bug no matter what IPSwitch says, even if
IPSwitch doesn't consider it a bug, FIX IT, everybody complains about
this.
* SQL7 Support, SQL2000 is almost out already. What is the hold-up?
Every product under the sun supports SQL7 and we have to rely on an
unsupported DLL from Mr.Nice should we decide to switch to SQL. This is one
of our biggest gripes as we need to migrate to SQL, yet can't afford to
switch to an unsupported product.
* SMTP service constantly crashing on certain message files and
hanging ALL SMTP traffic until that corrupt message file is removed. I
got off the phone with tech. support (quite pissed off I may add) after they
told me to delete all 8,000 messages from today and yesterday out of the
spool directory and that it should fix the problem. I'm sure it
would, but we're not going to delete 8,000 messages from our customers. We
ended up moving all the files out of the spool directory and slowly
feeding them in until it crashed. How long did it take? 6 hours to restore
mail service to normal after the initial 3-4 hours figuring out
exactly what the problem was. Totally unacceptable.
* ADDUSER.EXE - Honestly, how hard is it to have ADDUSER.EXE add
host admin privileges to a user? We're talking about adding a single
character to the registry/database.
* ETRN support working correctly. I've been through this once, but
here it is again. Lets say you have 30 normal domains setup in IMail and
10 domains setup for ETRN (NOT SETUP IN IMAIL, JUST THE HOSTS FILE AS IT'S
SUPPOSED TO BE). Now, turn on "Relay for Local Hosts Only" and all
the ETRN customers email bounces all over the place and never gets
delivered.
A few other features MANY people have asked for (not bugs):
* Standardized Web Interface such as .ASP Files calling a DLL or
ODBC connection to modify users/domains so modifications can tie in
with other modules instead of the proprietory Web Messaging Interface.
* Able to call ADDUSER/ADDDOMAIN from a remote PC with an admin
user/password as Mediahouse does with their liveStats
(http://www.mediahouse.com)
* Better Web-Templates - Our development department would be more
than happy to design a nice set and give them to IPSwitch if that's
what it takes.
I would like nothing more than to get a response from somebody at
Ipswitch with an explanation, possibly from a developer or somebody who
really know what they're saying. We offered to send in the actual file that
caused the problem on the SMTP32 process and the tech said "no, we already
know what it is, we don't need it". If that's the case, shouldn't it have
been fixed by now?
Thanks for your time, I look forward to a response.
-Mark McDonald
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
The Siteserver Network!
Voice: 800.610.9856, Ext. 231 - Fax: 888.333.2710
-----Original Message-----
From: Patrick Mast, WinFakt! [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]
Sent: Friday, August 25, 2000 1:26 AM
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: RE: [IMail Forum] Fw: "cocky" support
Scott,
> How is your evaluation on this product? We're considering
> conversion to VOPMail. We're sick of hearing "Imail is designed that way"
> from their tech support on something that is CLEARLY a bug.
Let me know what you think about VOPMail. I'm intrested too.
regards,
Patrick Mast
www.PatrickMast.com
Please visit http://www.ipswitch.com/support/mailing-lists.html
to be removed from this list.
An Archive of this list is available at:
http://www.mail-archive.com/imail_forum%40list.ipswitch.com/
Please visit http://www.ipswitch.com/support/mailing-lists.html
to be removed from this list.
An Archive of this list is available at:
http://www.mail-archive.com/imail_forum%40list.ipswitch.com/
Please visit http://www.ipswitch.com/support/mailing-lists.html
to be removed from this list.
An Archive of this list is available at:
http://www.mail-archive.com/imail_forum%40list.ipswitch.com/
