Yet another pathetic spam from WinZip

Is WinZip ever going downhill fast.

I purchased a WinZip license, as well as the self installer, back in about 2000 or so.   I upgraded over a few years and now am up to 9.0 SR-1 dated 2004.  Which is the last version on which I can use my original license key.  

In early 2009 I was getting an email from them every few months exhorting me to purchase the latest version.   Middle of 2009 this had increased to one or two emails a month in conjunction with other useless offers.   December 2009 I see three emails but it dropped two two emails a month until August 2010 which now had three emails per month.  And now these last few months they’ve been arriving weekly.

And they’re getting even shriller and more useless.   Registry cleaners, “back by popular demand” performance boosters.  Yeah, bull cookies, WinZip.

I could, possibly, figure out how to unsubscribe and WinZip might even honour that.   But it’s quite amusing to see just how pathetic WinZip has now become.

Oh, and I see no technical reason to upgrade my copy of WinZip. The AES security is still secure.     And you can be sure that I will be finding an alternate means of zipping my files in the future.   Almost certainly an open source product.

Published Tue, Dec 28 2010 21:34 by Tony
Filed under: ,

Comments

# re: Yet another pathetic spam from WinZip

I registered WinZip years ago and have noticed the spammy flavor of their emails (which I don't bother to open anymore). I've been happy with the free 7-Zip on my Windows PCs. I use it mostly from the context menu in Explorer. In fact I think 7-Zip is a major contributor to desperation at WinZip.

Wednesday, December 29, 2010 8:53 AM by Bill Melvin

# re: Yet another pathetic spam from WinZip

It is many years, Tony, since I used any third-party zip/unzip utility. I always just use the built-in Windows functionality. Any reason not to?

Friday, December 31, 2010 2:26 PM by Steve Schapel

# re: Yet another pathetic spam from WinZip

Bill, I use Winzip to backup about 5 Gb of my files on a regular basis to an SD card.   I found that 7-Zip took about twice as long.   I also use AES encrpytion which might be a factor.

Saturday, January 01, 2011 7:15 PM by Tony

# re: Yet another pathetic spam from WinZip

Steve, my initial complaint was that Windows searching went into Zip files as well which I intensely disliked.  So I disabled it and have ignored it ever since.

I do an AES encrypted backup on my files as well.  I don't know if MS Winzip has that capability.

Saturday, January 01, 2011 7:17 PM by Tony

# re: Yet another pathetic spam from WinZip

I thought it just me.

Tuesday, February 01, 2011 7:06 PM by SJones

# re: Yet another pathetic spam from WinZip

I've had 9.0 forever as well.  At work recently I was forced to upgrade to the latest version.  It seems to have more fluff than usual.

And Steve, I despise the windows internal zip functions.  But most of all, I have programs that zip files.  I built it with Winzip, and simply don't want to have to go back and figure out how to re-work that code to do the windows version of it.

Andy

Monday, February 14, 2011 3:27 PM by Andy

# problems with WinZip

I have been using winzip70 since 1999, and after many exciting and excellent service, it suddenly gives an error message on any PC with my mandatory additional OS, win98SE that" time stamp on Read me.txt and setup.exe dose not match. Any way to encounter that? Although I switched over to winrar+

Regds Waqar Anwar  

malikann@gmail.com

Thursday, March 31, 2011 1:17 PM by malikann

Leave a Comment

(required) 
(required) 
(optional)
(required) 
If you can't read this number refresh your screen
Enter the numbers above: