> If, by your own admission as above, the list of bugs is so long, why not > concentrate on fixing them *instead* of introducing a plethora of new > features which consequently makes that list longer, makes the bugs harder > to track down and harder to fix?
There is one player in the online communications field that has this philosophy.
That is Agent Newsreader. Agent users were promised a new version last June
that would have a wide range of new features, including the ability to use
multiple news servers all at once. I would say there is a fair chance that we will pass
this June as well without the new version. Forte on their website tells us that
the delay is worth it due to their legendary quality. Looking back through their
forum history, I can see that they are at least legendarily late with new versions.
I think that Agent can afford to take this stance because they really have no credible competition. And even though they do have integrated pop email, they have done nothing with imap. David Harris (Pegasus) has stated in one of his support documents that the imap specification is inches thick and unimaginably complex. I have heard much the same from Slaven of Pocomail.
I suspect that in the early days of email, it was not too difficult a task to put
together a decent email program that beat the pants off of Outlook Express.
It is no longer nearly so easy. Expectations are much higher.
> Professional reputation is the same be it for a road sweep or a software > programmer.
The parallel does not hold because it is not so hard to find a leak in a roof and
agree that it is one. 9val is right. Programming theory tells us that the stars
will burn out before we can remove all the bugs from a moderately complex
program. The different combinations of possible input are beyond human
scale. Add to this all the possible interactions with other installed software, various
hardware, and various versions of the underlying os, which, in the case of windows,
will certainly have its own bugs, and the problem is fiendish.
What we have in the world of email software is a number of players competing like
mad. Each trying to outdo each other with features and obeying the software god,
which decrees that the first one to market gets 80% of the sales. This is very
frustrating for somebody like me who has a real need for a well done email manager.
Gleason
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