I've just canceled my Spam Arrest account. At least I think I have. Why would I be unsure? I'll get back to that.
I signed up with Spam Arrest about a year ago after a trusted friend had strongly recommended it. I wasn't too worried about spam because I use Gmail and it already has uncannily good filtering. But I signed up with Spam Arrest because I thought it might be a good safety net for my publicly exposed email addresses. Just in case.
Rigging it up to my various email accounts to Spam Arrest was one of those low priority tasks that I didn't get around to for a long time. In fact I'd even forgotten that I'd signed up until I noticed the monthly billings appear on my credit card statement.
Eventually I set up my main Gmail account with Spam Arrest. Like their web site says, the concept is simple: the first time someone sends an email to that address, Spam Arrest sends out a verification request asking the person to do a one-time registration by clicking on a link.
As you can imagine, this should effectively weed out the bots and auto-morons who send junk mail to any address they can scrape. Basic human intervention is presumably the critical factor in this equation.
But the truth is that the rate of spam finding its way into my Gmail account didn't change. Of course Gmail caught all of it anyway so it wasn't a real problem. But it did bother me that I seemed to be paying for something that didn't work. I expected I would have almost zero spam getting into my Gmail server. It was not a big issue so I put it on the back burner for a few months.
Yesterday, even Gmail dropped the ball and a bit of junk mail hit my inbox. This got me thinking about the whole thing again so I sent an email off to Spam Arrest's customer support.
They responded promptly and courteously but the content of the reply was enough to end my relationship with Spam Arrest. I'll include it here for you to quickly scan:
Michael, you are looking at the wrong place for your filtered emails. Since you protected your Gmail account with Spam Arrest, the emails coming to your Gmail account will be taken to your Spam Arrest account and will be filtered. Once done, your clean emails will be placed under your Spam Arrest Inbox and all the junk emails will be in your Spam Arrest Unverified folder. So if you look in your Gmail account, you will still see the junk emails.
You have a couple of options to read your emails:
1. Use Spam Arrest Webmail (http://www.spamarrest.com/members/)
2. Configure an email program such as Outlook in your computer.If you want to configure your email program to collect the filtered emails, you can certainly do that. But you need to configure it according to our instructions. Its very easy once you follow the instructions from our online Client Configuration guide.
http://www.spamarrest.com/support/client/
Once you setup your email program as mentioned in the guide, all the filtered emails from Spam Arrest will get downloaded to your computer, leaving the junk in our server.
I won't deny that I obviously didn't configure something 'correctly'. But how complex should the process be? Here's what bothers me about the response I got:
While courteous and well intentioned, the response seems to be written with the assumption that I actually care to learn about the idiosyncrasies of Spam Arrest's system. Strike One.
The language is ambiguous. The word 'filter' is one of the most problematic words to use in any user interface context. I simply do not know the meaning of 'you are looking at the wrong place for your filtered emails'. Does 'filtered emails' refer to spam or the mail I want? Strike Two.
There is talk of another inbox, an 'unverified folder' and worst of all two entirely unwanted 'options' for reading my emails. I use Gmail to read my emails. It is far from perfect but it is my email client of choice. Strike Three, you're out Spam Arrest!
As a customer and user, the entire perceived value of Spam Arrest was that the system would be non-intrusive and based on the very easy to understand concept of having email senders verify that they are human beings and not algorithms.
And getting back to my uncertainty about my cancellation: since I terminated my account, my contacts have evidently each been sent an email from Spam Arrest's registration-bot requesting them to verify that they are real people and not spam-bots. 180 degrees wrong I'd say.
Here's my main point. It is very easy for software vendors to stray away from the core value of their products - that is if they are out of touch with their user base.
Looking at it from the user side, I would say that Spam Arrest completely missed the point of my basic interest in them. Was it in their interface? Was it in their customer support strategy? Was it in the apparently bloated complexity of the system? Was it in not properly streaming their customers into appropriate market categories based on complexity of need?
These deal breaker issues can only be avoided by knowing the users' needs.
It's a sad truth that many software vendors simply do not understand this basic fact: usability requirements for an application need to be as clearly defined and understood as its functional requirements. Or their customers will go elsewhere.
Likewise we, as users, should not settle for less than what we need. The alternatives are only one Google search away.
As a user I chose to terminate my relationship with Spam Arrest to stop wasting time and money. As a user advocate I chose to write this post to send a message to Spam Arrest that their system of design, engineering and customer support is not working. At least not up to what I would call reasonable standards.
Software vendors, especially producers of such utilities as spam filters, need to be very careful about the learning curves they expect their users to tackle. Don't make users go hunting around for functionality. Bring it to their door.