It’s amazing how much difference good customer support can make.

SugarSync has a good product. It could be better, but for the most part it’s really good. However, their customer support is rapidly turning me from being a fan to wondering if I made a mistake.

Sugarsync is basically a fancy front-end to rsync. This is what I expected, and wanted. They also have a web front end where you can browse your files. As expected, this interface is accessible only via SSL. So far so good.

However, it also has a feature where it detects that a directory contains images, and creates an album/gallery view of that directory. This content, for some reason, is accessible over http, and can’t be accessed over https.

Now, if you’ve ever been somewhere with an open wireless network (conference, airport, coffee shop) and experimented with a program like Etherpeg, you’ll immediately see the problem with this. Not that my photos are confidential, or blackmail material, or whatever, but they’re my photos. If I wanted them to be public, I’d put them on Flickr. Until I choose to put then on Flickr, I want them treated as though they were confidential.

So I opened a ticket, asking for SSL on the gallery view. I received a response that said that SSL isn’t necessary, because they use cookies for authentication, and so nobody can log in to get my content.

Um … huh?

I wrote back saying that I was well aware of what SSL is, and what cookie auth is. I didn’t wave my HTTPD credentials – perhaps I should have. But you can’t pretend that cookies substitute for SSL with a straight face.

I received a response back saying that my ticket had been closed, because it had been dealt with in a satisfactory manner. I wrote back once more asking that they consider what I had asked for a little more carefully, and that they take a look at Etherpeg.

No response.

Later on, I was trying to manage files on the server. They have this gallery preview, but in that view, you can’t rename or delete files. They have the file browser view, but there you can’t see which photo you’re looking at. I asked if they could either add the filename to the gallery view, so that I could at least know which files to delete, or add a delete option to the gallery view.

I got a rapid response saying “Our product doesn’t have that feature.” And the ticket was closed.

Seriously? That’s the response I get?

So, I guess that the feature set that’s there is the one that I get, and their feature request form on their website isn’t actually treated seriously.

Or, maybe they just use it as the inbox, and they have another issue tracking system behind the curtain somewhere.

One can hope.