Re: [IMail Forum] Some thoughts on Ipswitch

[Matrosity Tech Support]

Matt, I agree 100% with what you are saying but this has been talked about numerous times when it was something new to talk about. Ipswitch is not going to change their minds or they would have by now so CYA until you replace it. As for the increased prices, I was able to renew my agreement for $365 not the $695 quoted on their site. Review the recent emails with the 'abandonment' subject. Our plan is to buy a new server, deploy smartermail instead of imail and migrate our users to that. Once complete, we'll purchase another license of smartermail and will have two servers running it. End of life for Imail. Regards, Bill Matt wrote: While 8.2 seems to finally start addressing some functional improvements that are commonly sought after by IMail's users, I'm far from accepting of the company's new direction. My last service agreement expired earlier this year.  For that service agreement I got squat, in fact I got burned.  The only releases that came out were minor version releases that are generally available without the service agreement.  I never contacted support during that year.  Then to top things off, Ipswitch violated the terms of my service agreement by killing IMail as a product, and introducing IMail as a part of a much, much more expensive bundling of existing products that I never asked for or desired.  While the company somewhat backtracked from this decision to completely shelve IMail as a stand-alone product, they still refuse to sell IMail to the public and one can't build a business counting on them to deliver what is clearly within their means.  So we were all faced with an increase in a service agreement by some 40% over what it was previously increased to, and a product that you couldn't count on buying or upgrading in the future.  They even had the gall to state that they were not sure as to whether or not a new Web messaging client would be provided to us plebes that had service agreements but weren't using ICS.  It's clear as day that Ipswitch is only selling service agreements because they saw the opportunity to extract money from their existing customer base, yet when those decisions were made, it was also clear as day that they had no intention of abandoning their desires to become a major player in the collaborative software sector and migrating not just those of us that were willing, but giving us a choice or being willing and staying by migrating to ICS and the expenses that go along with it, or leaving. If Ipswitch wants to turn this boat around they need to do four things from my perspective: 1) Fire those that forced the abandonment of their IMail customer base in favor of the pipe dream of becoming a major collaborative player.  If not for the fact that these people are creeps that have very little regard for their customers, then for the fact that they are ruining the business. 2) Sell IMail publically as a stand-alone, unbundled product as was the case before. 3) Reorganize so that they can produce quality software for less money, and therefore compete at the pricing points that the rest of the industry is following ($695 for a service agreement is absolutely ridiculous, and probably breaks the elasticity of demand in addition to costing them a ton of goodwill). 4) Continue improving the core product so that it can compete more readily with other solutions on the market.  Following multiple notable improvements in 8.2 this will include scrapping their outdated and very problematic Web mail interface for a modern solution that utilizes IIS. Others around here might be more diplomatic, but I'm quite sure that at least in part, this is what the majority of us are thinking.  Ipswitch might make some inroads by attempting some or parts of these things, but they will never earn back the goodwill that existed before the changes were made last year. Matt -- ===================================================== MailPure custom filters for Declude JunkMail Pro. http://www.mailpure.com/software/ =====================================================