309604 - consumerreports.org - Consumer Reports mail client eval omits Thunderbird

Status: RESOLVED INCOMPLETE

(Tech Evangelism Graveyard :: English US, defect)

Description

[lars noodén]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/124 (KHTML, like Gecko) Safari/125.1
Build Identifier: 

This month Consumer Reports has 'forgotten' to evaluate Thunderbird and Eudora in its coverage of 
mail clients that also can do spam filtering.  Consumer Reports is consulted by many US citizens before 
making major purchases.  

Unfortunately, its recent evaluations it has started to neglect evaluating major MS competitors.  Last 
year it left Photoshop Elements and Gimp out of the digital image editor evaluation.  It would be 
unfortunate if CR were to fall the way the PC magazines did and cease evaluating the full range of 
products in order to give awards for that special "Microsoft look and feel."

http://www.consumerreports.org/main/content/display.jsp?
FOLDER%3C%3Efolder_id=760019&ASSORTMENT%3C%3East_id=333133&bmUID=112738331
4122

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1.
2.
3.
Actual Results:  
Contact with CR to include Thunderbird in the next evaluation of mail clients or mail clients with built-
in spam filtering.


Probably contact Eudora.com, too.  They're in the same boat.

Comment 1

[Ludovic Hirlimann [:Usul]]

This falls in evangelism.

Comment 2

[Bob Clary [:bc] (inactive)]

Paul, Rafael?

Comment 3

[Paul Kim]

I'll run this by our PR agency and see what they recommend. Will post back here on the recommendation.

Comment 4

[Paul Kim]

Here's the word back from A&R Partners. They're going to get in touch with Consumer Reports customer service and request a review of Thunderbird. Will follow up once we hear back from Consumer Reports.

===

Hi Paul,

We've done some research on Consumer Reports and determined that we will
email their customer service team to submit Thunderbird for
consideration. Here's some more information on their policies below.

Thanks,

Elizabeth 

Consumer Reports chooses which products to test based on the brands and
products that are ranked highest in their market based on market share.
The product must be available on store shelves for consumers to
purchase, because that's were they purchase the products they review.

As far as trying to get Thunderbird in Consumer Reports, when asked
about submitting a product for review, they said they do not accept
product samples and you can not pay them to review a product. However,
we can e-mail them information about a product on their Web site through
customer service.

Comment 5

[Chris Lawson (gone)]

Confirming, since Paul and our PR department are working on it.

IMO, it's sort of silly for Consumer Reports to review software at all, because in my experience, their reviewers don't know squat about it. However, since they take it upon themselves to review software, they owe it to their readers to review the major competitors, and Thunderbird certainly qualifies.

See also bug 326516.

Comment 6

[Chris Lawson (gone)]

INCOMPLETE due to lack of activity since the end of 2009.

If someone is willing to investigate the issues raised in this bug to determine whether they still exist, *and* work with the site in question to fix any existing issues, please feel free to re-open and assign to yourself.

Sorry for the bugspam; filter on "NO MORE PRE-2010 TE BUGS" to remove.