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Good Tech Support Yields Better Software


By Allen Holub
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June 15, 2004 —  (Page 1 of 3)
I was out of town last week, and was forced to get e-mail through a dial-up connection. My provider is SBC-the biggest DSL provider in California (this fact will be relevant in a moment).

SBC used to defeat spammer-friendly "open relays" by not allowing you to send e-mail unless your IP address was on its subnet (which was the case only when I was in my office). SBC has now switched over to password-based SMTP authentication, which makes me happy because I can send e-mail from anywhere.

I used to use (notice the past tense) Qualcomm's Eudora as an e-mail client. I've used Eudora for years and like it. Unfortunately, Eudora's config system is designed around the thought process of an individual who doesn't think like I do. I needed to set up the program so that I could pick up my e-mail from a spam-blocker service, which acts as a POP3 proxy, while continuing to be able to send e-mail via SBC's SMTP server.

To make matters even more interesting, the SBC e-mail address is in the sbcglobal.net domain, but SBC's SMTP server is in the yahoo.com domain. I had no problem making everything work from my office, where I was on an SBC subnet and never needed to use passwords, but it did not work properly from a hotel that used a different ISP.

After trying, without success, to make Eudora work from the hotel room, I e-mailed tech support three times over several days, but they did nothing but quote a Web-page FAQ to me. I called Eudora tech support, which is not a toll-free number, was put on hold for a half-hour, and was then cut off without ever being allowed to talk to a human.

At that point, I gave up. I'm now using Microsoft's Outlook, because it was trivial to set it up to work properly.

Why am I regaling you with my sad story? So I can talk about the importance of tech support in supporting the software engineering process. An organization that looks at tech support as a necessary evil is throwing away essential feedback that it needs to improve and refine (read "sell more copies of") their product.



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