I always found it as a massive setback and an overall discouragement with the way one is able to raise an issue with smartertools support. You actually have to pay for it and only if it is confirmed as a bug you get it for free. This is so 2000. None of the big companies, be it tech or software moguls do this - you are given a convenient way (within the product itself) to report issues to encourage a solid stream of bug reports which in turn help to make the product better. The number of portal users is nowhere near the actual number of SM users so the ST only has a small pool of people reporting back with the bugs.

 

We are still on version 15 and are dreading the day we have to upgrade but so far have delayed it for as long as possible (most likely will consider upgrading when version 17 will be mature enough)

 

SM seems to be constantly plagued by bugs and issues etc. and sadly this has always been this way. The general consensus of online users across various forums and online review platforms is precisely that the SM is buggy as hell. Not sure though if the CEO and team leaders have ever asked themselves why.

 

To be fair to them they have done an incredible job with SM v.16 but the bugs continue to crawl inside this rather sleek and mobile-friendly interface and its features. Mind you the rate at which they issue fixes is encouraging since it shows they are constantly on the ball!

 

Further the cost of alternative self-hosted mail solutions is at least twice the cost of SM unless you want to go the Linux route then it is free but you get what you pay for as they say so let's just leave it at that.

 

Hopefully ST will continue to innovate and invest in their product and ST as a "brand" in general.

 

 

100% in agreement with all comments by Damir, Arthur & SmarterUser. It's quite discouraging when the core email/calendar product starts to feel like an afterthought, and the bells and whistles seem to be more important to ST.

I was one of the first users to implement the v16 in beta.

On the forum there was a complete category named "beta". A lot of bugs were reported there (also about 10 from my side). When they decided to go to live version they deleted the whole beta thread messages. So no one know anymore what is the status of this bugs. This is not mature.

I know that some of this bugs they fixed 3 months after the go live version.

Also i had some issues about contact import from gmail. It was not working. After the report of a bug (chargable) they managed to fix the import. But all the contacts required manual binding of every field one by one. And this is not usable in the case you have 360 contacts like me. SM team think that is normal that the user must click 3000 times to import contacts in their system.

I've been thinking about this awhile, and I feel like I'm beating a dead horse, but perhaps here's what we *should* have seen by now:

 

Instead of a one-size-fits-all mobile-responsive browser app, there should have been the web app made specifically for desktop and laptop browsers (as there is now, through SM v15) PLUS IOS and Android apps from ST that work with the SM back-end.

 

When users are away from an Internet connection, they NEED to see their recent email and appointments off-line on their phone or tablet. Mobile email apps typically store email off-line between one week and one month from the current date, which most users find quite acceptable.

 

No one (and I do mean no one) that I know counts on a browser for their email (and related features) on their mobile device(s). They all have apps that take care of this for them; either the built-in email app that came with their device, the Gmail or Yahoo app, another 3rd party app, or an exchange-compatible app such as Nine.

 

Yes, it's nice to have webmail on your phone's browser working in a pinch, but nobody I know expects that to work with any degree of functionality, no matter what the provider (Google, Yahoo, SM or whatever).

 

OK I'm done.