Despite conflicting opinions regarding Incredimail, it never ceases to amaze me on just how contradictory the site advisories can be at times - WOT, for example display a proud message regarding incredimail stating "Congratulations on your sites reputation" which refers to the actual ratings, not comments, yet their overall rating is "good", not "excellent", just "good" whilst the comment statistics show the following:
Quote
Good customer experience: 1 person agree's
Spam: 37 people agree
Annoying ads or popups: 51 people agree
Bad customer experience: 85 people agree
Phishing or other scams: 15 people agree
Malicious content, viruses: 88 people agree
Browser exploit: 16 people agree
Spyware or adware: 104 people agree
Useless: 3 people agree
As my previous argument with WOT concluded, there has to be a better and more transparent method of voting for people to take ratings and comments like this seriously. An obviously and potentially questionable site like incredimail is getting (on the face of it) a good reputation from WOT when clearly many many people have commented to the contrary. WOT explains that if people want to rate it negatively, they can, and that's what makes up the overall rating, but we still don't know how many people have actually rated it and we don't know whether or not those doing the ratings have more authority over ratings than others. So, we could potentially have 100 people rating this negatively who don't have much authority or influence over the rating system in WOT, yet 10 people who are considered respective and authoritive raters could outweigh those 100 negative ratings?.
SiteAdvisor isn't much better, as they display "We tested this site and didn't find any significant problems" despite the many negative comments there also and the fact that incredimail initially offers a clean, unsuspecting download then goes on to explain you must change your default search engine to use the "MyStart" search engine otherwise you can't install IncrediMail. I'm sure previously, when I tested it it then continues to download even more garbage from their servers which is how they manage to avoid the adware or spyware trap from most of the site advisories because on the face of it, the download is clean - it's only when you go to install programs like this that additional stuff is downloaded and installed on your PC thus managing to skirt around the scanning of the initial file using things like VirusTotal, etc. These advisories really need to up their game if they are to stay ahead of the trickery that some developers are beginning to use but until they do they will potentially give the wrong advice based on unsuspecting users who rate the stuff positively whilst at the same time wonder why they have 100 toolbars on their web browser and their dead great great grandparents could rise from the dead quicker than their PC boots !!
Someone on the WOT forums even attempted to take us down here at FreewareBB, and to be honest I don't mind because I'm able to answer every question anyone wishes to throw at us and explain, in great detail, why we do what we do and how we do it. Sure, even we can't be 100% sure that some of our downloads are clean, all be it we do scan and check them but if a developer wants to change something at a later date, it's possible we may miss it but the difference with us is quite simply we make sure we listen to the people telling us about something they have found and we confirm or dismiss it in the nicest possible way - if a user told us a file contains spyware, we'd check it and remove it if necessary and I wouldn't care if it was a file from the largest software company on the planet or whether it was the highest rated download title on our site - if it was obviously dangerous it would be history on this site. Unfortunately, if a site is rated positively in WOT by many, yet had more negative comments, it would seem that site would still enjoy a good reputation - don't know bout you, but I can't figure it !!
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JoninOz, on 06 June 2012 - 12:36 AM, said:
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