IE Toolbar Bane of the Day

You think if you had 90% of a particular market using your products you would take responsibility when offering new products and services to your clients to help insure you keep your 90% of the market. But not Microsoft. I wonder if they ever consider the results of their actions when they push shit out.

Today Microsoft's Toolbar has been the bane of my existence. There seems to be one at least 3 times a week and it seems that the majority of those have to do with Microsoft or a Microsoft product of some sort.

Everyone seems to be pointing to the fact that Microsoft is dead and I can't hope for more. The issue comes from when you are promised something but delivered another. The final key to any success and continued success is customer service.

Let's take my trip to Exxon for example. I'll keep this off subject short.

Gas stations have degraded from such customer service to the point it pretty much should be a fully automated system running the place. When once there were people to check your oil, clean your windows or help in any way possible, it is now a place of broken pumps, over priced "convenience" items, and disgruntle workers. My experience was as I pumped my gas I decided to try and clean my window as I waited for the fill up. So I went over to the convenient trash bid, usually overfilling with trash, and grab the squeegee to find the water was empty. So I preceded to the next trash can and found the same thing. I tried 5 of the 8 trash cans with no luck. I find it sad that as customers you never get what you are promised.

This is the way I feel with Microsoft and their products. Today, I was launching a new email campaign for a client and during our testing found that their site, which the blast links to, was being blocked on their browser. Through many back-and-fourth emails, we determined that the client was using Outlook, IE 7.0, and had the new Microsoft Toolbar installed. This tool bar has a nifty little feature that can block or warn you about potential phishing websites you may be visiting from an email link.

It works like any type of Black list, which to me, if you are not maintaining your own list you are asking for a lot of blocked browsing experiences. When you go to a website, the Phishing filter contacts Microsoft and pulls a report on the site. If the site is a known Phisher then the site is ether blocked or warned about depending on your settings. If the site is not a known Phisher then the site is suppose to be displayed. Note the supposedly. In our case we got a clean, okay, report from Microsoft, but the site would never been shown.

We looked at all possibilities for this and could only conclude that the Microsoft Toolbar is a piece of shit destined to cause web developers headaches and just didn't work. We are still looking for solutions or workarounds for this. At the moment the only thing you can do is send feedback to Microsoft and hope they read it. Thus the inherent problems with Black lists. You are at the mercy of the manager of that list and in this case, if Microsoft screws up and blocks you or their software just doesn't work, like in our case, then you are blocked from 90% of the market.

The only fortunate thing we could find is that you need to have received the email in Outlook, then clicked on it to open IE 7.0 with the Toolbar installed for the issue to happen. But the anti-phishing feature does not need to be turned on to block the page as we have found. It just has to be installed.

I'm sure this is another nice way for Microsoft to track your browsing patterns and profile internet users, but at least put out a product that does what you promise. Remember, customer service Microsoft, customer service.