I should add to my original posting. The only bit of advice that I the Sr. Apple Mail Support Specialist gave me was to use Outlook. I own two 27" iMacs, 27" apple display, MacBook Pro, MacBook, iPhone6, two iPhone 5's, iPad, Apple TV, and various iPods of my kids. My family buys a majority of our entertainment from iTunes. I've standardized on the Apple platform for both my personal and business life for a number of reasons one being I want to simply my life. If I'm going to start piecemealing my applications together then I'm going to start asking myself what benefit Apple is offering me and why should I pay twice the price to be their loyal customer.
The last thing I want to do is take a primary application like email and set it up on a different platform since it's part of the single system I use for my digital life. Is she really admitting that Apple Mail is not a legitimate business application for email or is she just wanting to get rid of me? Either way if a Senior person in their product support group is telling me this it's a big red flag for me as a customer.
As much as I don't want to, I just switched to Outlook I will start considering Samsung, Microsoft and HP for my next hardware, phone and software purchases.
To me, the most alarming part was the attitude of indifference and the distinct impression that her conversation with me was a major inconvenience to her. I'm hoping that her attitude does not reflect the corporate attitude at Apple or is at least confined to her product group.
I'm concerned though. Since the arrival of Yosemite there seems to be a fast downward spiral in terms of my user experience. The Yosemite upgrade trashed my high-end 1.5 year old iMac. I've yet to find one change in Yosemite that has added value for me (Yeah, I'm sure there's something but I can tell you that whatever it is, it's not worth the negative effects I've already experienced).
With all this said, I have to say in fairness that I've had many more good experiences with Apple over the years. I guess I've come to expect that and maybe I'm overreacting to the sudden string of bad experiences with Yosemite, Mail and Apple support. My hope is that Apple will show some respect to its loyal customers and work on addressing some of the issues that are cropping up. The technical issues themselves are an issue for sure, but the most disturbing thing to me is the attitude, indifference and unwillingness of the support group to own up to the fact that there is an issue and to make some sort of genuine (or even well faked) effort to show some genuine concern.
We, the many loyal long-term Apple customers, are stakeholders in Apple, even if we're not stockholders or employees. We've invested a lot of our money and time and made a commitment through our decisions to standardize with Apple and many of us have been evangelists for promoting Apple to friends and colleagues.
As already mentioned in a prior post, if you are experiencing this issue please do take the time to provide even brief feedback using the channel Apple has provided for feedback, the more people who speak up the more likely it will be for someone to take notice at Apple: http://www.apple.com/feedback/macosx.html
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These types of emails and letters to CEO's can make a difference if enough are sent. I worked for a computer company for 10 years and remember a corporate meeting where an executive was addressing a large group with a handful of complaint letters from customers on a certain topic. There are a lot of factors but such letters and emails are most effective when they are passionate but concise and don't just vent (like I've done in some in my comments in this discussion forum).
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