Not impressed

I tried your plugin because it came highly recommended on some sites whose advice I generally trust.

However, it provides a poor out of the box experience. Setting it up involves moving through a number of different screens, raising the possibility that something will go wrong somewhere and you’ll have no idea where to go to fix it.

Similarly, the testing functions are not well implemented. I tried the first one I came across and it failed, referring me to the diagnostics page. I tried running the test from the diagnostic page and it worked. Go figure.

Sadly, even though the test on the diagnostic page succeeded — I could see the email in my in basket — trying to send out a newsletter did not. Everything appeared to be going well, so I hit send…and waited…and waited…and waited for something, anything to happen. The progress meter sat firmly affixed to 0…out of only 14 emails that needed to be sent (our site is new and doesn’t have a lot of subscribers yet).

What went wrong? Who knows? There was nothing in the logs. In fact literally nothing, no entries at all.

Is it worth my time trying to get this, ahem, fine piece of software to work? Or should I junk it and go with something which may not be as fancy, may not be as sophisticated, may not offer as many cool-looking upgrades…but at least works, out of the box?

– Mark