greiggy's dashboard

greiggy started following the idea "Show only unread messages" in Postbox, Inc..

greiggy replied on July 16, 2009 21:53 to the problem "Spam handling does not work as well as it could" in Postbox, Inc.:

Gmail filtering is a creative solution -- worth thinking about.

However, I'm not hearing that Postbox knows it has a problem in this area and is working on it... so there's little incentive to leave Apple Mail, which works very well and is likely to get tags in the next iteration

A comment on the problem "Spam handling does not work as well as it could" in Postbox, Inc.:

Why not simply put up a phpBB and then everyone can see all the threads -- and no childish icons to irritate your potential customers – greiggy, on July 16, 2009 21:53

greiggy replied on July 16, 2009 21:01 to the question "Spam is filtered but results are poor" in Postbox, Inc.:

Spam handling compares unfavourably top Mail and SpamSieve

Having just come back from holiday, I had an opportunity to make a comparison, using both Mail and Postbox. Mail handled most of the spam well and I spent about 10 or 15 minutes tiodying up the spam that was left

Postbox left me with literally hundreds, including the most egregious of porn and commercial spam with easily-recognisanle headers. I have done the training, marking sound a junk, for too long! There is no way I can consider paying for a licence, much as I like other features in Postbox, while the spam handling is so weak.


I would also rather be part of an active user community. Your handling of feedback is about the worst I have encountered recently, and it is notable that few people bother.


I am a potential licence fee payer and I am giving you two clear signals why I am not enamoured with the Postbox user experience. Doubtless my view could be extrapolated many times, but not many will have my persistence....


There's lots that's good in this product but as a company you need to attend to glaring faults and raise your customer game, to survive in a competitive market!

This reply was created from a merged topic originally titled
Spam handling does not work as well as it could.

greiggy replied on July 16, 2009 20:00 to the problem "Trouble logging into GetSatisfaction" in Get Satisfaction:

Get Satisfaction sucks. Couldn't you transfer to one of the better forums -- there are plenty to choose from.

1. Can't see the different threads

2. Login usually fails -- it is unduly troublesome (and I'm an experienced user)

3. Just a rubbish resource -- I want to be able to see what issues/feedback others have reported, and learn from them

This reply was created from a merged topic originally titled
Get Satisfaction sucks.

greiggy replied on July 16, 2009 19:47 to the problem "Spam handling does not work as well as it could" in Postbox, Inc.:

I use Gmail for one of my accounts and it is good -- and clean. I have two other accounts which are linked to two different areas of business. One of these is quite a longstanding (but memorable) identity and it does collect a good share of spam.

My main thrust was to draw attention to how Apple Mail with Spamsieve is good at learning and recognising spam. Whatever it is that is built in Postbox lets through some of the most blatant spam which it *should* recognise easily -- from the header alone.

Spam is a big issue -- the biggest? -- in email client function. Postbox is weak in this and it lets an otherwise good product down. The other let-down is that the company doesn't seem to know how to say, "We appreciate you bringing this to our notice and be assured it's on our list for early review".

Or to make an analogy, it's not a lot of good bringing a beautiful performance car to the market if a design flaw makes the wheels prone to falling off.

greiggy replied on July 16, 2009 18:29 to the problem "Spam handling does not work as well as it could" in Postbox, Inc.:

The most annoying thing is a little yellow star and a cheesy comment saying "The company says this solves the problem"!!!!

No word about "Be patient, we're working on it" or "We will review the forum presentation".

• The company apparently doesn't realise that it falls way short of its main competitor in filtering out (or not filtering) spam

• Even worse, it doesn't realise how stupid it looks making bland, insincere comments on the world's worst feedback system!

You could do so much better....

And you should change the heading back. It is an accurate heading to what I am trying to communicate

greiggy reported a problem in Postbox, Inc. on July 16, 2009 11:20:

Spam handling does not work as well as it could

Spam handling compares unfavourably top Mail and SpamSieve
Having just come back from holiday, I had an opportunity to make a comparison, using both Mail and Postbox. Mail handled most of the spam well and I spent about 10 or 15 minutes tiodying up the spam that was left
Postbox left me with literally hundreds, including the most egregious of porn and commercial spam with easily-recognisanle headers. I have done the training, marking sound a junk, for too long! There is no way I can consider paying for a licence, much as I like other features in Postbox, while the spam handling is so weak.

I would also rather be part of an active user community. Your handling of feedback is about the worst I have encountered recently, and it is notable that few people bother.

I am a potential licence fee payer and I am giving you two clear signals why I am not enamoured with the Postbox user experience. Doubtless my view could be extrapolated many times, but not many will have my persistence....

There's lots that's good in this product but as a company you need to attend to glaring faults and raise your customer game, to survive in a competitive market!

greiggy shared an idea in Postbox, Inc. on July 16, 2009 11:07:

Dump Get Satisfaction

Get proper forum

greiggy replied on June 04, 2009 07:46 to the question "Spam is filtered but results are poor" in Postbox, Inc.:

This is more helpful. The link refers to Thunderbird, which I have used in another office I used to work in.

You should realise that not everyone transferring to PB will be a former Thunderbird user. Many will come from Apple Mail and Entourage which are the big Mac mail apps.

May I make a suggestion? Why don't you put this information up somewhere? There's no instruction about training that I can find. People coming from an Apple Mail environment will not expect to do the training manually by marking every single message (actually, I don't. Why doesn't PB just examine the corpus of retained vs junk messages itself?)

PB has some good features but the operational information is fairly useless and your reliance on Get Satisfaction does the company no favours at all -- get a proper system up and running and you will get more credibility

greiggy replied on June 03, 2009 21:15 to the question "Spam is filtered but results are poor" in Postbox, Inc.:

What do you mean? I mark junk mail manually and tag mail which is kept (some deleted).

When i search for "train" or "training" in the utterly execrable Get Satisfaction system you insist on using, it returns nothing of value.

You reply has not moved me on at all

greiggy asked a question in Postbox, Inc. on May 28, 2009 08:41:

Spam is filtered but results are poor

Spam is filtered but poor results. I'm using beta 12 which has fixed the issue with spam not being filtered at all on POP3 accounts.

Now I am seeing some filtering activity but PB's ability to learn is inadequate.

I regularly remove by hand (keyboard J) spams containing the same header, same sick content, same words. PB should learn that certain words in a header, and the common missspellings of them, constitute junk. PB should learn that mail from a certain sender is junk.

I am still trialling PB against Apple Mail and Spamsieve. White PB has superior threading and tagging -- a big advantage -- the junk handling is poor compared with Mail + Spam sieve.

It does need to improve a lot to be comparable!

I am not expecting it to filter 100% but I am removing far too many by hand -- and the training/learning as I have remarked, seems poor

greiggy replied on May 10, 2009 20:46 to the update "Test Build for Next Update Now Available" in Postbox, Inc.:

Test build does seem to be taking out most of the junk now. This makes a huge difference. I am hoping that recognition of spam will improve as time goes on.

greiggy replied on April 23, 2009 21:19 to the problem "Junk mail does not get moved to the "Junk" folder." in Postbox, Inc.:

I'm using a mixture of 2 IMAP accounts and one POP3 -- the latter is an address I've held for about 15 years so it is heavily spammed.

Thanks for recognising the problem and I look forward to beta12

A comment on the problem "Trouble logging into GetSatisfaction" in Get Satisfaction:

I made the point that you have to log in to report that you cannot log in. This is a piece of interface incompetence... really basic stuff. Also, you have not said that you will correct the other glaring fault -- you should put your support@ email address, if not prominently, where it can easily be found. These are well tried and tested protocols that are followed by everyone else in the online community. It is just arrogance to make your own rules, especially when they create real problems for customers, as I have taken some trouble to spell out. – greiggy, on April 23, 2009 16:14

greiggy asked a question in Postbox, Inc. on April 23, 2009 09:26:

Get Satisfaction sucks

Get Satisfaction sucks. Couldn't you transfer to one of the better forums -- there are plenty to choose from.
1. Can't see the different threads
2. Login usually fails -- it is unduly troublesome (and I'm an experienced user)
3. Just a rubbish resource -- I want to be able to see what issues/feedback others have reported, and learn from them

greiggy replied on April 23, 2009 09:21 to the problem "Junk mail does not get moved to the "Junk" folder." in Postbox, Inc.:

I'm using beta 11. Basically the same problem. I have done more than enough training, but I still get an inbox absolutely teeming with spam. Running the spam routine on the folder doesn't remove it.

This is a deal-breaker for me. Apple Mail with Spamsieve works well, easily and reliably.

I can check the spam folder easily to catch any mails which were spammed incorrectly. I seldom have to do more than that.

The spam filtering part of Postbox appears to me to be broken, and functionality I would expect to be there, isn't

Even with the shortcut J, it's a long job to identify each piece of spam individually. I expect 90% of that to happen automatically.

A pity, because Postbox has some very good ideas

greiggy started following the problem "Junk mail does not get moved to the "Junk" folder." in Postbox, Inc..

greiggy reported a problem in Get Satisfaction on April 23, 2009 09:13:

Trouble logging into GetSatisfaction

I can't get into Get Satisfaction. I have two standard email addresses and logins/passwords. GS doesn't recognise either of them. It just says (annoyingly) "That email address is taken".

Even more annoyingly, there isn't a support email for GetSatisfaction to get ID and password issues. resolved. The absolute height of stupidity is that you have to log in to report that you can't log in. I have had to resort to adding yet another GS account just to tell you that youyr login procedure don;t work well and there's no facility for helping with lost passwords etc