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Goodbye and good luck
Idea shared by Damir Matešić - 2/23/2018 at 6:18 AM
Proposed
I am moving my mail server to another product.
SmarterMail is not a complete product with a lot of glitches and problems and the dev team is not mature to be able to handle problems and real user requests.
I admit, SM is so fancy, nice looking and i would say a perspective product, but the time for that is maybe in the future when the team realize that the customer is one that is important!
It would be nice that they learn somthing from their customers, but they don't.
So, good luck.

19 Replies

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Sad to ear that... I like SM and I hope that over time it gets better and better.
For my curiosity, which product will you migrate to?
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I didn't want this post to be an advertisement. Just to let know my thinking and suggestions. So if you like to get the info mail me at dmatesic@gmail.com
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And the problem isn't that it will or not be better, but that there is a lot of problems and new production versions of the product are full of bugs and problems. Email systems are not a new technology. It should work perfectly. I see every week a new fix with 20+ issues resolved for a product that is almost a year after the release date.
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what software did you replace it with?
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I think the problem is their licensing model. In order to get renewals, they feel like they have to have a major release every year. (And some of those "major" releases were anything but major.) The thing is that most of their customers would vastly prefer a stable product instead of bells and whistles.
15
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.
 
 
2
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.
4
I just want them to fix the user interface wasted real estate issue!  But they won't :(
 
I have seen many promises of skins by the team on this forum but this never happens and now they are working on v17.
 
It feels like we dumbed down our user-base and we told them that they need big buttons and lots of padding now and they can only handle 10 e-mails on the screen at one given time.
 
Tim Uzzanti needs to listen to us and Make SmarterMail Great Again!
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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.
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Chargeable? Really, now.
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All tickets are chargeable untill they don't realize or confirm that is a real bug. Read the rules on the page.
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I totally agree with you Arthur. The only thing in your post that i think is not 100% true is the price of other solution. SM is not so cheaper than other solutions. The price is almost the same. The only difference is in license type. In SM you get license price by number of users/mailboxes and in some other solutions you get unlimited users but multiple versions of the same product depending of what features you need.
And SM gives you a headache for free :)
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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.
 
 
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And to quote Ronald "Tim Uzzanti needs to listen to us and Make SmarterMail Great Again!"
Kendra Support http://www.kendra.com support@kendra.com 425-397-7911 Junk Email filtered ISP
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Paul, well said. I totally agree and could have used your support 2 years ago when I tried to drive this point home. :)
https://portal.smartertools.com/community/a87523/why-new-ui-in-smartermail-16.aspx

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Kevin, indeed you've had my support all along; I just couldn't verbalize it in the way I guess I just did.

BTW That thread is now over 2 years old. "6 months" came and went a long time ago, doncha know.
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Matt Petty Replied
Employee Post
There is actually some new stuff that's been buzzing around the web development area that actually is trying to close the offline client <-> browser gap.
https://medium.com/progressive-web-apps

With buzz-words like caching network calls, instant load times, using the browsers DB, being able to fullscreen, along with getting OS features like, being able to put an icon on the homescreen, and having access to native push notifications. Browsers are starting to support it left and right, I'm pretty excited personally about this, we'll see how well it takes off.
Matt Petty Software Developer SmarterTools Inc. (877) 357-6278 www.smartertools.com
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Matt, there are unfortunately a couple of qualifiers in your response, such as "trying to" and "starting to," which don't solve the issues right now. And we are all well aware of issues with browsers such as caching. And browser-caching a month's worth of email with folders and sub-folders sounds like quite a feat, not to mention calendars, tasks etc. IMHO "native" apps on mobile devices will be the way to go for some time now.

What you're suggesting sounds like it's still in development. These solutions are needed now. And to be sure, you have only two environments for which these apps are needed: IOS and Android, with Chrome OS a distant third. And in the case of Chrome OS, browser webmail of the SM V15-sort will typically be completely acceptable.
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Matt, thanks for replying. It's re-assuring that you and the SM team are viewing these posts and listening to your customers. Also, good that you're keeping an eye on the future with new stuff in web development.

Suggest moving this mobile UI conversation to another thread, maybe the one I referenced above. Instead of dwelling on a negative thread, let's continue a meaningful discussion on the SM16 UI thread where many pros/cons of a mobile web interface are already listed.

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