RunBox Subscription & Support Failure

[NJSS]

I paid for & renewed RunBox service some 7 hours ago, and received acknowledgement of payment through PayPal @ 26 May 2012 9:54:17 BST Transaction ID: 4287918521581833W.

I then had access to my RunBox account for a few minutes, during which time I tested it account by sending & receiving test messages - all was well.

I signed off, and on endeavouring to sign on again was met by the message:-

"Dear Name (lllllllllll@runbox.com),

Account expired

We're sorry, you're trying to access an account whose subscription has expired.

Please renew your subscription now to unlock your account or try the links below to continue."

I raised a support ticket #KUV-849-48888 at 12:11.

Now some 4 & a half hours later there has been no response to the ticket & I still cannot access my account.

RunBox state:-

Runbox are real people

Runbox gives you personal support via email and live text chat 7 days a week, all year long........With Runbox you can be assured that your email will work right away — we will help you get started or move from another provider, and help resolve any problem that might arise.

Despite the above there seems to be no support at present.

Is this typical - do they actually work 7 days a week, or if this simply marketing hype?

Can any user advise me when I am likely to receive a response please?

NJSS

[William9]

That's disappointing, and it may not even be a holiday weekend in Norway. It reminds me of a post on this forum a few years ago when Runbox described moving its server(s) across town in a car. Small operation with limited resources?

[NJSS]

Thanks William..

Even if it was a holiday weekend RunBox claim to offer support "7 days a week, all year long" - no exceptions for holidays etc..

It's very disappointing as I was contemplating a move from FastMail becasue of the possible take-over of Opera by FaceBook:-

http://www.emaildiscussions.com/showthread.php?t=64630

I guess I am going to have to seek a refund from RunBox and look elsewhere; RunBox could loose a lot of potential transfers from FastMail, due to this poor level of service.

NJSS

[dbowdley]

Hi NJSS,

I am sorry it took us the best part of a day to reply to your support ticket. Usually we are faster than this. The problem has now been resolved and Liz has replied to your support ticket.

We do offer 7 day support for users, there are no days off. The hours worked by people doing support do not always match the traditional 9-5 working day in Norway (or anywhere else for that matter) and do vary from time to time. Servers are of course managed 24/7 by a different team.

Best wishes,
Dave

[NJSS]

Thank-you Dave & Liz problem resolved.

Frustrating day though - at least the weather was nice.

NJSS

[mechanic]

Originally Posted by NJSS

....

I guess I am going to have to seek a refund from RunBox and look elsewhere; RunBox could loose a lot of potential transfers from FastMail, due to this poor level of service.

Yes I'm also looking for a replacement email service following the Opera rumours. As part of the change-over process a scan of the support forum is of course sensible. There have been two threads that I saw complaining about slow response to tickets, so that is a big question mark for Runbox.

I see this forum is cheek by jowl with the FastMail one, even log on with the same credentials, so are the two companies connected in any other way, sharing assets perhaps?

Of course it's not unusual for large companies to hoover up smaller ones to protect themselves, enter new markets or to acquire key technology, so we must expect that sort of thing with ISPs from time to time.

Has anyone a feeling for the overview here, how many customers for RunBox, how many employees, how much capital, in how many countries and so on, or pointers? The ratio of support staff to customers is also quite important!

Regds, mechanic

[FredOnline]

Originally Posted by mechanic

I see this forum is cheek by jowl with the FastMail one, even log on with the same credentials, so are the two companies connected in any other way, sharing assets perhaps?

If you look at http://www.fastmail.fm/docs/forum/index.html it says "Please read before proceeding to our forums.

Clicking on the links, you're then transferred to EmailDiscussions - even the general color scheme matches.

[Geir]

As Dave mentioned, we usually respond faster than we did in this situation -- and within a day at most. We try to respond to urgent inquiries immediately, but we are a small organization (6-7 people plus sysadmins) managing a customer base in more than 150 countries so we can't always cover every timezone fully.

Being a small company also means that we are independent, and we intend to keep it that way. Runbox Solutions AS (a Norwegian LLC) is mainly owned by the staff and key personnel who have been running the Runbox email service for years. These are the same people you know from this forum representing Runbox.com, i.e. Kim, Liz, Dave, Kirill, and myself, plus a handful long time friends and supporters we know and trust.

In addition, our partner Copyleft Solutions AS, who are responsible for hosting and managing our servers and are contributing substantially to our development, own a small percentage of our company. For more information about Runbox Solutions AS, please see http://www.runbox.com/about/company-information/.

Since Runbox Solutions AS is a Norwegian company, our operations are governed by the strong privacy regulations of Norway. These regulations, in addition to our own terms and policies, protect our users and their data from monitoring and inspection. For more information, please see http://www.runbox.com/why-runbox/ema...ffshore-email/.

Runbox is not connected to Fastmail besides both having their support forums hosted here, and thus sharing some history. We consider them friends as well as a source of inspiration, although they are on a slightly different path than us.

We thank you for considering Runbox as your future email host and will do our best to make you feel at home.

- Geir

[William9]

Are customers' connections to the Runbox servers enforced as secure TLS or SSL?

[dbowdley]

Secure connections are an option and the required ports are detailed on our website.

http://doc.runbox.com/twiki/bin/view...xHelp/Overview

You will find the details under the "Access" section.

Secure connection to the web-mail via https is also available.

Dave

[mechanic]

Originally Posted by Geir

We thank you for considering Runbox as your future email host and will do our best to make you feel at home.

Thanks for that - I wonder if you can tell us when your webmail interface will support drag and drop re-ordering of the folders under INBOX?

[William9]

I've been reading the website information for Digiplex, Copyleft and Runbox. Impressive. Looks like RB has improved its infrastructure markedly from when I had an account several years ago. RB seems like a good choice. How is it doing with system redundancy, spam control, features, UI and uptime?

[Geir]

Originally Posted by mechanic

Thanks for that - I wonder if you can tell us when your webmail interface will support drag and drop re-ordering of the folders under INBOX?

We don't have any plans for implementing this functionality yet, so for the time being you would have to use numbers or symbols to force the folders to appear in the order you want.

You can organize your folder hierarchy (folder/subfolder structure) in the Folders screen, which is accessible by clicking the Folders header in the left pane of Webmail.

- Geir

[Geir]

Originally Posted by William9

I've been reading the website information for Digiplex, Copyleft and Runbox. Impressive. Looks like RB has improved its infrastructure markedly from when I had an account several years ago. RB seems like a good choice. How is it doing with system redundancy, spam control, features, UI and uptime?

Thank you -- it is quite a different situation from just a year ago, and we are just getting started upgrading our server park.

The most important addition thus far is a new ZFS based backup server which is powerful enough to stand in as a live storage unit and application server. This means we have full data and service redundancy and multiple layers of backup.

Our next step will be to acquire a new pair of database servers, eliminating the one remaining critical SPOF. We will also start building a new SAN and acquire more application servers to increase stability and responsiveness further -- although we haven't had any unscheduled downtime in a long time.

Meanwhile we are getting close to deploying Runbox 6, which is a major rewrite of the web application for Apache 2. At first it will look and work like RMM5, with the addition of tag support and improved sub-account administration, but will make further development much easier.

We're also working on improving spam filtering (a never ending battle it seems) and a bunch of other minor upgrades.

- Geir

[mechanic]

Originally Posted by Geir

You can organize your folder hierarchy (folder/subfolder structure) in the Folders screen, which is accessible by clicking the Folders header in the left pane of Webmail.

Thanks for that gem, just what I needed to re-arrange folders imported from MailStore! Maybe the info could be added to the 'help' pages, I couldn't find it there.

Runbox is looking better and better!