Jan 24 2007
Product Review : eMail Manager 3.0
Background on myself : I’m the quasi IT guy for a foreign real estatecompany in Tokyo. I am a bit of an IT hobbyist, so all of the IT stuffthat isn’t done overseas gets filtered down to me.
Now - this is a quick review on Email Manager Pro, or email Manager 3.0, at http://www.email-manager-pro.com/. I hope this page reaches someone who is considering purchasing it.
Thecompany I was working at bought this software, and it was myresponsibility to set it up. I set it up. For basic test mails, it wasfunctional. The design and use was confusing, but it seemed to workalright. HTML support was pretty patchy, but after a few hours oftroubleshooting I managed to get it working.
We started to runinto real problems when we imported our list of 3,749 customers(private and business) into the system. It handled the import noproblem. 6 people in the office spent about 2 days putting thenewsletter together; filling it with useful information about themarket and local opportunities. I took all the information, andconverted it into HTML, which took a couple of hours. So far so good. Ichecked, double checked, triple checked, quadruple checked all of theinformation and the HTML page. Looking good.
Then I created the first mailing, select the entire 3,749 person list, held my breath and clicked send.
Awindow popped up, and was immediately squashed by my pop-up blocker.AARGH. I immediately disabled the pop-up blocker. Should have been thatcoming. Damn. I hope it’s not sending the mails in the background. Hm..I’ll try again.
Do the same series of motions. Hold my breath.Click send : a popup window comes up. It starts flicking through namesas it sends the mail out. Great! I check my address and it’s comethrough. Time to go get a coffee. But wait - I look at the screen, andit’s frozen. Must just be pausing before the next batch. 10 minuteslater, it’s the same. Uhoh.
I contact the support number that islisted on the site. I would have called that number about 30 times -not a single answer. This is calling at every hour of the day - duringthe day and at night as well. I emailed the support. Nothing. I sentmany more emails. Nothing. Finally, I sent a last email demanding ourmoney back and threatening to complain if I didn’t get an answer.
I was about ready to go crazy, but then I got a reply from support. "Please give us acess to the system."
I replied : "No, sorry. It’s a secure system and I don’t have authority or the ability to give you access."
The reply "It’s hard to help without access. Try increasing these two values."
What"support" didn’t seem to understand was that we couldn’t just increasethe values and try sending it again. What if it didn’t work? The onlydefinite thing that would happen, is all of the first 500 people thatgot the newsletter would get pissed off since they would get it again.
Intenselydissatisfied, and the worst money I’ve ever spent on a defectiveproduct with crap support. Thats a pretty harsh review, but it’s damnwell true.
After this, we got http://www.activecampaign.com/12all/,which is absolutely amazing. More expensive, but it does the job andthe statistics are intelligent and it works great. Highly recommended.
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