> All of you believe what you want but I am not affiliated with Ipswitch. > Yes I come from the same Class B, what of it. The same could be said for > 16,451,580 other people.
I think there are a lot of people on this list who are nervous, myself included. I know that I have invested a lot of time and money on Imail. The issue for me is will Imail be viable for my business next year, and the year after, and 5 years from now. Imail has been a very comfortable fit for my business. The initial purchase price fit my budget, and together with Declude and KillerWebMail templates, I have been able to provide my clients with a dependable, feature-laden solution. But I am nervous that I am about to be left in the dust. There appears to be a trend towards moving the pricing towards "enterprise class". The first indication of this was the method used to upgrade to 7. The second indication is the extremely high pricing for their virus solution. If version 8 comes out as a $4,000 upgrade, or as a $2,000 a year subscription model, it's game over. My business will have to look towards a Linux solution. The other thing that makes me nervous is an apparent trend towards treating current customers poorly. Increasing the pricing is part of that, but I'd be the first to say that with the exception of the virus add on, the upgrade pricing itself has been bearable for my company. I only hope it stays that way. But besides the pricing, I feel that changes in version 7 were done exclusively to draw new customers, not to satisfy current ones. Maybe I am wrong, but were there really a lot of customers demanding a calandar? On the other hand, it is one more thing to put on a checklist of features for the marketing guys. Finally, I am offended when a company employee writes about their product without identifying themselves as such. It is to the point where I am gun shy; if someone comes out strongly supporting Ipswitch on anything, I immediately wonder if they are an Ipswitch employee. My bottom line is this: if Ipswitch wants to make this an "enterprise class" application (in other words too damn expensive), that is fine. I'll move to something else, along with 2/3 of the current customers. 3 years from now Imail will be no more. But I really hope that is not the case. I would love to hear someone from Ipswitch say "we understand our niche as a reasonably priced mail server, and are committed to keeping upgrade and/or service agreement pricing increases to the rate of inflation." I understand if they want to add features to draw more customers, but I don't want to pay a premium for that. If they are features I can use, that should be a bonus to me for paying the service agreement. But new features shouldn't cause the service agreement to rise at a rapid rate. I really hope that there is no reason at all for me to be nervous, and that I'll be an Ipswitch customer for many years to come. We'll see. Paul Navarre 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/
