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by: Bernard Teo








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Thu 12 May 2005

Version Tracker

Category : Commentary/versionTracker.txt

I've just updated Version Tracker and MacUpdate. I hadn't updated them for a while but they seem to be able to pick up the Postfix Enabler for Tiger releases all on their own. But they had the links wrong. So I had to go update them.

I saw a comment on Version Tracker just now about the password or serial number not working on the login screen.

This is puzzling because I never had a single e-mail about this. One would have thought that a person in this situation would have first contacted the author, having paid good money for something that didn't work.

So, this is another MBA moment. How do you handle this?

In times like this, I think we need to go back to first principles - with the acceptance that people are not actually buying, say, Postfix Enabler. They have a problem they think Postfix Enabler can solve. So they're buying a solution to their problem.

Following this, I've made a refund to a person living in a dorm who did get his SMTP server to send mail, but he realised that he still had to go through the Smart Host, so there wasn't any point in using his own SMTP server. The software worked, but he didn't get what he was looking for - so I returned the money. That's sort of working according to the principle.

You know when Postfix Enabler works, it works beautifully. But there were a couple of cases where I couldn't tell why Postfix Enabler wouldn't work on those users' machines. It's quite difficult to debug these remotely. So many things can go wrong in the system (the network settings, the network itself, no available DNS server, a case-sensitive file system, a machine without a host name, manual modifications to the config files that Postfix Enabler is too stupid to work around, plus a zillion other things). But I think people appreciate it when I do give it a go anyway because it's really not worth the 10 bucks. So I'm actually relieved to be able to refund the money when things don't work out. There's a limit to what I can do a few thousand miles away.

So, I try my best to do the right thing but I am still disappointed with that comment on Version Tracker. I'll be glad to be shown where the login screen doesn't work and fix it. Until then, the evidence from all these downloads is that it does work. But it does leave a trace of fear, uncertainty and doubt, doesn't it?

Posted at 3:35PM UTC | permalink

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