Tuesday, February 16, 2016

Vendor warning: LOGICnow - they own MAXfocus / MAXMail

I hate posting something like this but LOGICnow spurned me as a customer and hopefully I can help out some of my IT Peers to avoid them.

I'll try to keep this review short.

Technically we were an almost 6 year customer of their anti-spam product called MAXMail.  Due to what I would consider "failure to perform" on their end, I decided we needed to find a new solution.  Issues such as long delivery delays (over an hour at times), some of our business partners could not get any email through them (to us) at all and we had to setup special email routes to bypass the service, the web interface was clunky and would error out ALL THE TIME, plus the service really didn't do a great job of filtering spam.

The construction company I work for actually acquired another construction company down south and they used MAX Mail since May of 2010.  We were unhappy with our in-house product and wanted to switch so we thought we'd try MAXMail as the company we acquired seemed happy with it.  Instead of monthly payments I negotiated a better rate with them if we paid annually, so I paid up front for 1 year.  Almost instantly I was not happy with the obvious spam they let through (even at max aggressiveness) and then the intermittent long delays would happen a few times a week.  These long delays were killers, then coupled with the other issues I already mentioned I decided we had to switch.

So we just recently went with a Barracuda appliance and so far I am much happier!!

But then when I tried to contact my LOGICnow rep to inform her to cancel our service and I would expect a refund on the remaining 6-months of service, they eventually (after days of trying to even get a response) was told... well, here is the response:

Subscriptions are non-refundable, so I will not be able to honor your request. Even on the monthly billing option, which you declined, I would not be able to refund “unused time” if, for example, a customer cancelled on the 15th of the month. Again, I am sorry to hear that you have been dissatisfied with the service, especially given that the XXXXXX domain has been with us since May 2010. 

Well, even though I figure they owe us about $1,700, I've got better things to do than squabble over this as I doubt I will get anywhere with them.  So I hope that at the very least I cost LOGICnow more that 10 times that amount in steering people away from them.  I responded to her that I was disappointed in LOGICnow's unwillingness to work on a graceful exit for a 6 year customer, especially since it wasn't like we decided to switch for no reason.

I could go on and on about the issues, such as having to setup local rules to catch the spam they let through, technical support actually trying to convince me that the long delays were not them and must be our senders (like the whole world) and there was nothing they could do, etc.... but I think this is long enough.  If anyone sees this and has any questions or comments please add them and I'll try my best to respond.

I didn't try these other products, but as the parent company is LOGICnow I would think twice about them as well.

MAXfocus
MAX RemoteManagement
MAX Mail
MAX ServiceDesk
MailProtection

BTW - I wrote the above a few weeks ago but figured before posting it I would contact Mr. Alistair Forbes, LogicNow's General Manager.  I sent two emails and got no reply, even though in an email he wrote below he gave his info to contact him.  So judge for yourself if this is a company you want to do business with.  Obviously they finally acknowledged an issue, but were not willing to make it right by me.

The email ---

December 01, 2015

At LogicNow, we are passionate about helping our customers win through technology. It’s a mission we take seriously and recent issues with our mail services are not in alignment with this objective. We understand that businesses rely on timely delivery of their email, and we understand the very significant impact that message delays can have on our partners and customers. We sincerely apologize to those who were affected by these issues and we have restored the level of reliability that our partners and customers are accustomed to and deserve.
    
We have been working diligently to quickly remediate and understand the causes of any service disruptions, and have resolved three primary causes. First, we have deployed additional servers to handle the increased load of emails. Second, we have resolved Office 365 delivery snags which arose from changes made by Microsoft and impacted a small subset of customers, and have secured a commitment from Microsoft for improved communications going forward to help avoid future potential issues. Finally, we experienced an unforeseen issue with the Cyren malware detection tool when they released an updated anti-virus engine that proved to be slow in its response times, impacting service delivery; we have since removed the problem sub-component from our mix while we work to resolve this with Cyren. In the meantime, we maintain robust antivirus support that will help us continue to effectively protect our customers against email-borne threats; as part of this we recently introduced file-based attachment blocking as an additional technique to ensure our malware protection is at the highest level.

We hope that these details are helpful but realize that in our customers’ eyes, no matter how quickly we resolve these issues, your overall satisfaction is determined by your experience of using our services and we clearly need to do better going forward. We have put in place specific measures to help ensure that we do not experience these types of disruptions in the future, and are committed to delivering the level of service excellence you have come to expect from LogicNow.  
    
If you have any questions regarding these issues, please let me know. You may reach me directly at Alistair.Forbes@logicnow.com.  

We appreciate your patience and understanding as we work to continually improve our service.
    
Again, our apologies.


Sincerely,

Alistair Forbes
General Manager, LogicNow


About Me

My photo
Science Fiction Author / Vice President of Technology for The Christman Company