Polarismail service lack confirmed!
 

A little update on the "unhappy polarismail experience" thread almost a month ago.

George committed on September 25th in this thread he would "solve this privately".

As no contact had come through I contacted him privately 5 days later with a quick response committing to "definitely completed this week".

I sent a mail requesting to receive a status update on October 5th, 10th, 17th and 20th. No response at all from George to any of these requests.

I think it is fair to say they've had plenty of time for their last chance to turn out positively.

Some people may think this is great service. I think it is fair to conclude that Polarismail is not a supplier of quality service, and in fact is severely lacking service and reliability.

For people tapping into polarismail with limited amounts of email and service I am sure it works out just fine, but allow me to demystify all the positives on this forum.

1) Do not be blinded by their juicy 25 GB, Polarismail can't handle 5GB of mails and that's from experience. They claim to be somewhat faster nowadays cf. recent posts in this forum. I have yet to experience that. It took me a good 2 hours to move a couple folders with a total of less then 10.000 messages without attachments ... yesterday.

2) Do not be fooled by George replying quickly in these forums as a sign of good customer support. He does not keep the simplest of engagements and does not reply to simple status update requests.

3) Do not believe people on the forum telling how great it is to have features implemented at polarismail. Polarismail have been unable to implement a feature that according to them (I wouldn't know) is simple and easy to do, since March this year ...

I'm sure many people have positive experiences, but the complete lack of unhappy experiences should trigger alarm bells. When you read between the lines on these forums, many positive replies come from people who receive a life-long free email account at Polarismail.

For the record, I have requested several times to pay for service. George feels that as long as their service is not up to standard one should not pay. As honorable as that is, I am sure Polarismail would keep its promises if not keeping their promises would cost them as much as polarismail costed me in lost time.

It took me several weeks to upload a mail backup to Polarismail. I feel taken hostage by Polarismail since I have the choice between an email provider that has proven tremendously unreliable, or spending another couple of weeks uploading my email archive to another provider.

So before you decide on going to Polarismail, think twice! They could end up costing you more then you'd accept from a free service!

I'm sorry to hear that you're still having trouble with your email service provider. I would just like to put a couple of things in perspective:

How fast is your internet connection, and how far away are you from Polarismail's datacenter in Montreal? I can easily imagine waiting 2 hours to download & upload 10K small email messages using a typical DSL or cable connection. IMAP has a large overhead that becomes quite noticeable when the network latency (ping) is high.

Again, how large is your backup, and what were you using to upload it? 10GB with Thunderbird? Yep, that would take a couple of weeks with my crappy DSL connection, too.

I don't know which planet you're from, but last time I checked, it took only 7 months to go from March to October. If a child was conceived in March and born in October, he might be in need of an incubator. Of course, that's still too long to wait for a feature that was promised "soon", but methinks you might be exaggerating a bit!

As far as I remember, George told you that he'll not accept payment until he could fullfill your requirements, in your previous thread. Could you explain?

I understand your frustration that things didn't work out. That being said, let me clear up a few things.

I'm sorry for not being able to implement the feature you had requested in time. I presented it to our dev team and it's still on the table, with other features being yet more pressing.

Here's where we stand on the support we offered you:

1. You presented us with a total of 100 000+ e-mails to migrate which we spent in excess of 10h trying to bring over to our services. The reason for that is your archival method which was inadequate and an IMAP to IMAP transfer was impossible. We had to perform an online zip file transfer, with mailbox structure conversion and what not. At the moment you are being "held hostage" by this same issue which was caused initially by improper backup methods, several years ago probably.

We have users with a lot more messages than yourself and there are no issues whatsoever. Trying to run a search on 100 000+ messages with missing headers is a whole other story.

2. I believe there are plenty of customers which are more than satisfied by our service. Once again I apologize it couldn't be the case with you.

3. To my knowledge, there is only one person who received a life-long free account - and I'm pretty sure he's not even using it.

The reason why your mail-client backup is working so slowly is because you are doing a mail-client backup. Aka the messages are transferred server-client-server which slows things down considerably. You are also doing this for 100 000 messages.

I'm quite sure that if you do an IMAP speed test against anyone out there, we will come on top by orders of magnitude. We routinely do IMAP transfers from Google for example and their servers are much slower than ours.

Not to get into the middle of anyone's argument, but I believe I received a free account a few years ago and although I use it very sparingly, I thought it was supposed to be free forever.

Maybe I'm the one guy George was referring to?

Didn't others on here receive these free accounts from George?

Weren't they supposed to be free for life?

My experience with Polarismail from a support standpoint has been great. I typically get a response from George or someone else within an hour and typically only minutes. I know they have been working to improve their Enhanced Email service (which is based on Group Office) for a while. It's much better than it was initially. Is it as polished and fast as the big boys (Gmail, Outlook.com, Office 365, etc.)? No, but it has some features those don't have. Granted I don't have anywhere near 100,000 emails and sometimes I do get slowness when searching but I do it so seldom it is not really a problem.

Just my two cents...

i've read the other topic too and seems like they've already gone far out to satisfy your demands. i'm fairly certain they have other clients just as, if not more important, that they need to help too and cant devote 24/7 to your custom needs. only reason i can think that they continue is b/c you must have a lot of cash you are wanting to throw at them.

I don't understand why some would try to argue there has been plenty of service. Perhaps people should read again the lack of service response experienced?

The situation is much more complex then what George tries to highlight, and to be honest, this was solved back in April I think. This is not what this is about, and, the improper backup methods are AOL IMAP and GMail IMAP with a local backup in another software then thunderbird. Seems to me there are many people using AOL IMAP, GMail IMAP and another client then Thunderbird.

I could not agree more, there are plenty of positive reviews for Polarismail, and I am sure the business can not live only on Polarismail users here on the forum. I'm very sure there are plenty of happy users, but to become a happy user one should first be in a position to use and benefit from the service.

In time? We must have a terribly different view of "in time". Now, you don't mention the lack of reply to support requests, no mention of why an according to Polarismail "simple" promised feature implementation has been delayed since March this year. Chief George said: "It will be definitely completed this week as I've bumped it ahead of other tasks for my programmers." This was a confirmation first day of October, and I understand it as deadline October 5th? Still it is not done, and I can trace plenty similar confirmation situations for the same "simple" feature all the way back to March.

If the boss (George) commits and it doesn't get done, then there is obviously something else going on: no intent to honour the commitment.

George, if you can't or don't want to get it done, then don't promise to customers it will be done. I would not have moved to Polarismail in the first place if you would not have committed to implementing the "simple" feature … several times since March.

I'm done waiting for a company that promises and doesn't deliver. BUT, I am held hostage.

"Being held hostage" is from not receiving replies to emails, and seeing how quick and wonderful you are on these forums/in public. You know of my "slow" (100k upload) connection and large archive, and so you know if I want to move elsewhere I'll be faced with plenty of time and energy uploading my archive yet again to another email company. It is sadly what I'm forced to do.

There is no other way since Polarismail blocks or is blocked (I don't know) on the likes of ShuttleCloud, DropMyEmail and MigrationWiz. I tried all three of them over the last few days, none could get though to the imap.emailarray.com polarismail server to migrate the mails. See for yourself:
https://picasaweb.google.com/1180577...eat=directlink

nobody is blocking us and we are not blocking anyone.

the reason why the IMAP to IMAP transfer doesn't work ( which is what you are trying to do ), and the reason why it didn't work originally when we tried to do it from other hosts ourselves is that your messages are missing a lot of headers. In essence they are not valid IMAP messages and the transfer software fails because of this.

The only way ( that we could find ) to do it is to get a zip file of the mail folders and place it on the new host's server as is ( or converted ) and hope it works.

If you give us an online drive, we can upload your mail folder there. It is currently in Maildir++ format which should be easily readable but a lot of folks out there.

Zinneken has invited us to read this interchange. My opinion is that Zinneken's situation is unusual and expectations are unrealistic.
PolarisMail seems to be going above and beyond what I consider an expected level of support.
It will be informative to us reading this discussion to hear if any provider can successfully handle the importation of the 100,000+ message archive with reportedly incomplete headers.
How about the alternative of Zinneken just leaving the 100,000+ messages stored locally and starting fresh with a provider? I'll bet the inbox will be more responsive.

If it were me, that is what I would do. I have similar broken messages (from years ago) just sitting around locally.

Not sure about Polarismail's reported lack of service but I've not had a particularly good experience recently either and that's before even using the service. Why they insist on being supplied with a telephone number when signing up for an email service is beyond me. If I wanted to divulge my private telephone number to a company I knew very little about (and hadn't even trialed yet) I would have gone to Gmail and given them everything they asked for. There are too many companies today insisting on (and believing they are entitled to) private information that is not relevant to the service they are providing and as a result many of us are inundated daily with spam texts and cold calls. Thanks but no thanks.

I'm pretty sure they just ask for it for credit card purposes. Most companies I've dealt with online that ask for a credit card, also ask for a telephone number.

The information is required by our payment processor as part of their verification process in order to combat possible fraud. They are PCI compliant which means your information will be kept private at all times!

Whenever you purchase something online you are asked for your credit card information and your billing address, telephone number. This is standard procedure and I don't know of anyone who doesn't follow it...

Never in all my years of using the Internet and credit cards online have I been repeatedly asked (forced*) to supply a genuine telephone number. Address: of course, telephone number: no. I have never given out my real number and will not start now.
Furthermore, I had't even chosen to pay by credit card, I had chosen to use Paypal and a another email service provider happily accepted payment without it immediately after.

* - two follow-up emails requesting a valid telephone number as the one I supplied did not work.

Although, in Polarismail's defence, it is their payment processor PayPro Global who are being ridiculously over-zealous and there are other incidents documented on the Internet where PayPro Global have insisted on a genuine telephone number, which in my opinion is only going to lose (and has lost) retailers a proportion of sales.