As Shep said previously, if email is mission-critical, don’t use budget hosting. But there is one thing that does have potential merit as a gripe.

Like others, I too put in a support request when I found I could no longer access my email via squirrel mail. The reply said you were changing the interface. Then I watched the interface change as your techs worked behind the scenes. Suddenly I didn’t have to type in my user/pass info to get to the spam folder anymore. Then I noticed I’d get logged off every other attempt to view an email from the list pane. That problem disappeared too and things got smoother. So I could see progress being made, and I knew if I was patient, things would get better.

However, it almost looks as if you’ve been implementing changes live before actually putting them through a development phase. I confess, I often experiment with lives sites myself, and my own efforts are nothing compared to what you’ve achieved. And there’s no doubting the human effort behind what Dreamhost has achieved in hosting.

It’s one thing to mess around in a single live site or server. It’s another matter entirely to expose live customers to experimental changes on this scale. Also there is an email system I’ve signed up for that’s supposed to tell me when things are changing that will affect my server. I didn’t get the memo. It would have been nice to be given advanced warning - say about 24 hours or more. That’s a standard operating procedure, isn’t it?

I appreciate everything you guys do. The capabilities and changes made on this hosting situation regularly make it far superior to any other inexpensive shared hosting competitor. I would like advanced notice for changes you’re actually working on. Please, please, please - proactively use the ‘System Changes’ subsection for planned upgrades and changes to tell us far in advance what will happen when. Don’t just tell it after it’s happened. And add a status section for planned implementations from the suggestions so we know ahead of time which ones you’re actually working on this week so we don’t have to rely on an unordered list from the control panel.

Pretend we’re on a college campus and you’re having to make changes for the Dean of the school. You’re not going to do it without telling the Dean first. Pretend your customers are the Dean. The respect factor will skyrocket if you can show you’ve got a plan and that things are on schedule.