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Feedback

© Brian Hughes

Most of this article comes about from the request I made last week for help in gathering recommendations and experiences.

Not only did I receive a link to a program similar to MailReactor but also a copy of some interesting correspondence. By the way, I did indeed make use of this program during the week with good results. The only thing that disappointed me was not being able to copy and paste the E-mail addresses into the index... typing each one in individually was a chore.

I will be making a suggestion to the author about this. Remember, most authors like to hear from users with constructive ideas on how to improve the program. This leads me into the next item very nicely.

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What follows is courtesy of one of my regulars; Barry Brandt : olfoo and I'm very grateful for his time and interest.

"From your most recent Suite101 column I wanted to bring your attention to the freeware program I use" : FletMail

"It's small, uses easy to access text files, and the author Esben Jensen is very nice and discusses openly problems, design, use, what can be improved.

My point is something that you mention in your column that you can remind and encourage.

For the author's who do say they want feedback that they indeed follow through... something I've found happens only a minority of the time. Even something as minimal as "thanks" or "got your message" from the author after I've sent them a detailed bug or feature report is all I expect, --- but get less than half the time.

I find very few good programs include support. In freeware I don't expect, but leap to investigate when I see a FAQ and links to a forum. I'm sharing part of today's e-mail from Esben.

= = = = =

Yes I certainly do have plans for handling the sent items. When I was working on 1.1 I found a lot of bugs that I thought really needed to get fixed so I didn't get around to do all the features that I really wanted - I thought it was more important to get the bugfixes out quickly. So what you see in the sent file is a quick and dirty implementation.

I've made a couple of screenshots of what I'm working on at the moment.

I'm doing a tabbed treeview in the lefthand side of the main window. The field list takes up much more space than is really necessary so I split up