FPTech Mailing

[Tom Podnar]

This is almost too funny.

I know a bit about email. But I know a heck of a lot more about Backup software, and my clients are glad I do. I don't think I'll be hiring any professional bulk mail companies given the amount of bulk mail I send, or tasking a BackupEDGE developer to email instead of product. I suspect it is not on top of FPTech's list of things-to-do, either. 

The email had value to me and the annoyance was trivial to me (I just pressed Delete), since they don't do it a lot. Do I wish they'd handled it a bit better? Sure. They probably do too, in hindsight. But on my list of annoyances over the last 24 hours it was very small indeed.

However, I completely respect your opinion that the lack of value to you in the email was worth complaining about and that the annoyance to you was worth spending more time writing about. C'est la vie.

Tom

----- Original Message -----
From: "Fairlight" <fairlite at fairlite.com>
To: filepro-list at lists.celestial.com
Sent: Tuesday, July 30, 2013 12:53:52 PM
Subject: Re: FPTech Mailing

On Tue, Jul 30, 2013 at 09:16:19AM -0400, Tom Podnar thus spoke:
> This is a very small text message from someone you LIKE, who emails ONCE
> IN A GREAT WHILE.

That's part of what makes it so annoying; very few companies that aren't
clients are set to make it to my $DEFAULT inbox in procmail, and the ones
that do aren't supposed to abuse the privilege.

> I got 7 messages, and the total bandwidth taken didn't amount to one bean
> out of the can, let alone a hill. The message is short, to the point, and
> sends you somewhere else if and only if you want more detail. It doesn't
> even try to download an image that takes more bandwidth than the email.

It's not the bandwidth, it's the principle of not having to deal with
something more times than necessary.  I get enough mail that dealing with
yet more (or wondering if I forgot to sync my mailbox and having to check)
is simply a waste of time.  It seemed like every other time I flipped to
email, I had another one.  It's an unwanted distraction by a party flagged
as trusted.

The other principle is that, when you've been apprised that your software
has screwed up, gone rogue, and is bothering people, you don't let it keep
going:

/etc/init.d/postfix stop

It's really -that- simple to stop the immediate flood, until you can sort
out the back-end that's actually acting as an MUA, and selectively (or
wholesale) flush the MTA queue.  That they didn't care enough about their
customers and potential customers to be arsed to issue ONE command...well,
that pretty much says it all.

What'd they do instead?  I got the same private mail Jay did...the one
saying they couldn't do anything about it.  From my point of view, that's
simply not true.  Yes, yes they could have done something.  See the above
command.  And if they didn't know how to issue that command, they shouldn't
be running a mail server - or should hire/contract an admin who has a clue.
Heck, the mail server presumably has a power switch...  The "we couldn't do
anything" doesn't hold up over a period of ~12 hours, sorry.

> We all make mistakes. When I send newsletters I occasionally send more
> than one copy to people, even though I try not to. It happens.
>
> My thoughts about the seven emails were "whoops, they boo-booed", not
> "let's report them as spammers and THEN hang them".

Mistakes do happen.  I make them myself.  But when I'm alerted to the fact
that I made a mistake, I -fix- the mistake as promptly as possible, and
minimise the fallout of that mistake as soon as possible within the fixing
process.

Perhaps I just expect more professional and responsible administration of a
mail server than I just witnessed.  Anyone can have issues; it's whether or
not (and how) you fix them that dictate how seriously people take you in
the future.  I'd be a lot more forgiving about this if they'd actively
intervened after being told it was still occurring, rather than letting it
run its course and issuing a rather weak and inaccurate mea culpa.

> Maybe we should just forgive them in this case and decide for ourselves
> whether the message itself has value.

How many times do we have to decide?  :)

And actually, I don't feel it did have much value, because it pointed to
release notes which I looked up - release notes which were so blazingly
incomplete and unclear as to be nearly useless.  For example:

I'd love to know -exactly- what the new "HASH" functionality does, what
limitations it has (arrays were limited in size for ages, and filePro is
well-known to have a lot of artificial in-memory limitations, so it's a
valid question), and how it works.  It got a minor blurb that wasn't even
enough to tell if it's the kind of hash (similar to Perl's hashes) I've
wanted for years, finally come into existence, or if it's something else
entirely.  For all I know, it's not even a data hash table, it could be
an MD5 digest hash function or something.  That could be the difference
between getting someone to upgrade, or telling them it still isn't worth
it, frankly.  In my case, full, uncrippled Perl-style hashes would be a
-VERY- compelling upgrade feature, for which I'd recommend clients upgrade.
The ones that would ignore the whole license manager and subscription
fiascos, anyway; there's still so much resistance to that, it's not funny.
But a feature like Perl-style hashes would be something -worth- at least
reconsidering for.  As it is, who knows what that does?

This is par for the course, though.  fP has been underdocumented since the
end of the big, honkin' orange manual in a binder - arguably the last
comprehensive and well-organised documentation I ever saw for the product.
The release notes don't appear to be any better, and certainly never went
through any sort of marketing.  There's not enough there with which to make
any sort of informed decisions.

Anyway...  That's an illustration of how much value the email had.  Next to
none.  Next to none -seven times over-, spanning half a day, is a bit much.

mark->
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