PGP Desktop Professional - 9.8

I paid beginning this year for an update that is now completely useless. It is incompatible with Leopard and PGP crashes. I cannot even open my encrypted discs or any other encrypted files. Most ridiculous is that you I have to pay $30-40 for each customer support contact. Judging from the user forums every mac user is facing the same problem.

I've been using PGP 9.0 since it came out, installed every update, etc. When I first installed the software, it wouldn't work with Pine, so I worked through the user forums to try and sort this problem out. Essentially, I gave up--PGP Desktop 9 doesn't work with Pine, don't even try.

Next, I had a problem with retrieving messages using Thunderbird. PGP Corp told me to purchase a $43 support incident, although I paid $200 for the software. Finally, it was worked on the forums, although not without snide comments from the PGP folks themselves about all sorts of nonsense. Essentially, they claim this is a bug in Thunderbird, not their problem, and it's okay if you pay $43 to sort out interoperation problems with software they are supposed to work with.

BTW--you have to pay $43 to get a support incident so you can even log onto their web site, and get access to their knowledge base, to solve even common problems.

Finally, PGP just flat stopped working a couple of days ago. I called for technical support, and was told to purchase a $43 support incident. I posted the problem, in full detail, on the user forums, and never even received a single response. I purchased their $43 support incident, and then the support incident was down all day, it just happened to come back up a few minutes after business hours, when I could no longer work on the problem with them until after the weekend was over.

To make matter worse, their support model is strictly based on a "call back" basis. You ask them to call you for a problem, and they call you sometime in the next 24 hours. You have to sit around waiting for their call, so don't go out to dinner, don't go to the store, don't play with your kids, and don't go to the bathroom, in case they call while you're sitting next to your phone. The time they spend calling you and leaving a voice mail counts against the 20 minutes you get in the support incident (for $43).

Their support staff is snotty, and horrible. The first time I called about the problem with the support incident, they claimed there was an "echo" on the line, and they needed to call me back to work on it. When I asked when they would call me back, they said "sometime today, maybe monday...." (this was on a friday. I asked why they needed to call me back, and they said "there's an echo on the line." So, they have to wait a day to call me back for an echo? I asked the support person this, and he just laughed, and said: "That's the way we do things here, you never call us, we always call you. If you don't like it, I can't help you."

I asked to speak to a supervisor, and he laughed, and said: "They're never hear, and they'll tell you the same thing. You're a single user license, it doesn't really matter."

Avoid this product, and this company, at all costs. Use enigmail, or some other solution, instead.