BlueMail Reviews
For a while BlueMail ran a dedicated site collecting user and press reviews in one place. What it was, and where that feedback lives now.
1 min read
BlueMail used to run a separate site collecting reviews in one place: bluemailreviews.com, a showcase for what users and the press were saying about the app.
The idea was straightforward. Ratings on an app store are a number and a paragraph, scattered across five different stores and impossible to read as a whole. Press coverage is worse, spread across dozens of outlets in several languages. Putting both in one place made it possible to see the shape of the response rather than a slice of it.
Readers could submit their own. Write a review, send the link and your site logo to [email protected], and it would appear alongside the rest.
Archive note. This piece is from 2017 and is kept for the record. The bluemailreviews.com site is no longer online, so it is named here rather than linked. Current ratings live on the app stores themselves, and the BlueMail site carries present-day coverage.
Why a company collecting its own reviews is worth being skeptical about
Worth saying plainly, because it applies to every vendor that does this.
A review page curated by the company selling the product is a marketing surface. It is not dishonest to run one, and BlueMail Reviews never claimed to be an impartial aggregator, but it selects. The unhappy reviews do not get a logo and a link.
The useful sources are the ones the vendor cannot edit: the one and two star reviews on the app stores, which tell you what actually breaks, and independent coverage where the writer had no relationship with the company.
Read the vendor’s collection for what the product is trying to be. Read the low ratings for what it is like on a bad day. The truth is usually visible in the gap.
