{"id":30,"date":"2006-06-26T10:06:55","date_gmt":"2006-06-26T15:06:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/daviddalka.com\/createvalue\/?p=30"},"modified":"2007-04-27T10:16:43","modified_gmt":"2007-04-27T15:16:43","slug":"online-e-mail-service-reliability-need-improvement","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.daviddalka.com\/createvalue\/2006\/06\/26\/online-e-mail-service-reliability-need-improvement\/","title":{"rendered":"Online E-mail Service Reliability Needs Improvement"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>At present, I have 4 web-based e-mail accounts, Google&#8217;s <a href=\"http:\/\/www.gmail.com\" target=\"_blank\">Gmail<\/a>, Microsoft&#8217;s <a href=\"http:\/\/www.hotmail.com\" target=\"_blank\">Hotmail\/Live.com<\/a>, <a href=\"http:\/\/mail.yahoo.com\" target=\"_blank\">Yahoo! Mail<\/a> and my University of Chicago Graduate School of Business &#8220;Email4Life&#8221; account.<\/p>\n<p>I can now discuss the issue without being accused of favoritism or bias because all four of the organizations above have now done this recently. This is the issue of e-mail reliability and making large changes in the live environment and ignoring the issues of a continuous and positive user experience is a disturbing trend. All of the above providers have had large outages and\/or rollbacks to previous versions in the past month. This is not optimal and should not become the &#8220;norm&#8221;.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;d like to ask program managers to please consider the following going forward:<br \/>\n1) Reliability of service is paramount and should not be sacrificed<br \/>\n2) Sacrificing long-standing features in new versions is not a good idea<br \/>\n3) Communicating and explaining the feature upgrades transparently is encouraged<br \/>\n4) Asking for user feedback on new features is encouraged<br \/>\n5) If the application operates more slowly using Ajax than it did before, please optimize it before implementing<\/p>\n<p>I would hope that these organizations would understand the potential attrition and retention implications of actions such as these and change their future actions before it adversely affects them.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;d like to share a glimpse at the top items on my wish list for improvements:<br \/>\nGmail<br \/>\n&#8211; I love the conversation bundling feature, though there are times when I would like to unbundle a conversation and adding the ability to do this would be helpful<br \/>\n&#8211; Automatic spell checking (the new Hotmail\/Live.com Beta has spell check integrated as you type &#8211; this should become the best practice)<br \/>\nHotmail\/Live.com<br \/>\n&#8211; In Live.com, restoration of the radio buttons to complete actions on multiple e-mails at once is necessary<br \/>\n&#8211; Stability of Live.com needs to be a priority, I switched back to Hotmail for now (you get kudos for the feedback form &#8211; though an acknowledgment that shows someone read it would be confidence inspiring)<br \/>\nYahoo! Mail<br \/>\n&#8211; In the new version, restoration of the radio buttons to complete actions on multiple e-mails at once is necessary<br \/>\n&#8211; Automatic spellchecking (the new Hotmail\/Live.com Beta has spell check integrated as you type &#8211; this should become the best practice)<br \/>\n&#8211; In the new version, I&#8217;d like it to look and feel more like the old Yahoo! Mail &#8211; e-mail me if you&#8217;d like more detail<br \/>\nUniversity of Chicago<br \/>\n&#8211; Build an understanding that Email4life is a critical alumni networking tool and treat it as such<br \/>\n&#8211; Communicate clearly with all members of the community and act on their feedback in an accountable manner; In summary, providers need to fully consider the user experience when making changes in their offerings<br \/>\nDo other people have other suggestions or thoughts on this issue?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>At present, I have 4 web-based e-mail accounts, Google&#8217;s Gmail, Microsoft&#8217;s Hotmail\/Live.com, Yahoo! Mail and my University of Chicago Graduate School of Business &#8220;Email4Life&#8221; account. I can now discuss the issue without being accused of favoritism or bias because all four of the organizations above have now done this recently. This is the issue of [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[10,1,6,5,4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-30","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-email-marketing","category-general","category-google-goog","category-microsoft-msft","category-yahoo-yhoo"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.daviddalka.com\/createvalue\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.daviddalka.com\/createvalue\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.daviddalka.com\/createvalue\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.daviddalka.com\/createvalue\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.daviddalka.com\/createvalue\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=30"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.daviddalka.com\/createvalue\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.daviddalka.com\/createvalue\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=30"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.daviddalka.com\/createvalue\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=30"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.daviddalka.com\/createvalue\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=30"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}