Profimail Issues

For an email client on all of my 4 symbian phones I use Profimail because it provides a desktop like experience, is highly configurable and support rules for filtering. I have been using it for over a year and pride in using it over the standard nokia email client including the new nokiamessaging client.

The number of issues with nokia messgaing over the past months have had me laughing at people who use it and the number of times it failed. However today we the profimail users were the ones to be laughed at.

For some reason we could not collect email for the majority of the day and we were getting weird connection 300/301 errors please contact the application vendor messages. At one point I had a blue screen of death (BSOD) which whilst common in windows was most unwelcome on the phone. But I had to laugh at least I didn't need to reboot.

Anyway the issue was because the software we had purchased couldn't connect to the registration server to see if we had a legitimate version. Apparently there is an option to have his removed but you then lose the portability of being able to move the application to a new handset.

Eventually at the eleventh hour after the forum here was clogging up with message and after several emails the application began working. LCG responded with the email below:

Dear customer,
we acknowledge that our registration server was down today for few hours, and we sincerely apologize for any inconvenience caused to you.
We tracked and fixed the error. We'll also put more failsafe code into future version of ProfiMail, so that any problems on our side don't harm you as customer.
Once again our apologies, and hopefully you'll love to use ProfiMail in a future.

Best Regards,
Lonely Cat Games Team

So it turns out there is no acutal redundancy available in their Registration server which effectively means the application will stop working. Why on earth it needs to check in with this server each time I collect email especially after I have paid for the software is beyond belief. Then there lack of acknowledging there is an issue either via the forums or using facebook or twitter is very poor.

Being in IT I know you get engrossed in the issue at hand but you also need to remember your customers as we are the ones who pay you.

The issue of checking the license each time reminds me of the WGA issues in Windows. It is a shame when a company needs to police the ones who have purchased the software. I appreciate they have to look after their interests but there are better ways. When I purchase the software they have my imei so they can supply a key. They could even employ a check each time an update is completed to see if the install is legal. Lastly, they could even use twitter with NAGIOS or provide a simple web page providing server update statuses.

Whilst I could use other email clients available to me I will still continue to use Profimail for its featuresn and hope that they change both the way they treat their customers in not providing updates of issues and that the license check is permanently removed or a alternative is found.