For the most part, I love AWeber. But as I wrote last year, they've got a few really irritating problems. Here's my latest gripe.

About a month ago, I deleted 11 follow-up messages from one of my autoresponder sequences -- they weren't converting, so I axed 'em.

AWeber keeps track of the last follow-up message that was sent to each subscriber by number. Here's the problem -- when you delete follow-up messages, they don't fix the number for subscribers who've already received the deleted message. So most of the people on my list are at message 17 even though there are now only 6 messages in that sequence.

I'm planning to add more follow-ups at some point. When I do, I'd like to have all my subscribers receive them, so I need those numbers to be reset to 6.

I submitted a support request to have that done and was told they could do it -- they just needed my login ID and password to do it. So I got on their live chat, provided the necessary information, was told it'd be taken care of, rated support as "excellent", and left.

That was yesterday. Today, everybody's still at message 17. Can I change my support rating?

In AWeber's defense, there is a legitimate reason for not automatically updating the numbers when messages are deleted -- someone might be deleting old messages in order to replace them with new messages that say the same things, only better. So they might not want the new messages to go to people who got the old ones.

Of course, the customer could just edit the old messages rather than delete and replace them. But since some customers will replace and delete, some problems can be solved by not updating the numbers.

AWeber, here are two ways you could fix this problem:

1) When I delete a follow-up message, give me the option to fix my subscribers' numbers.

Reader Comment:
Roger Mitchell said:
Previously, I was an AWeber fan. There are few autoresponders that will provide everything that one needs. Since experiencing some of the same problems, I looked at other AR's to compare. I have now switched to Traffic Wave. It took me some time to ...
(join the conversation below)

2) Give me a search and replace feature (the previous suggestion would be better for this particular issue, because it would handle cases where I'm deleting a message from the middle of my sequence more gracefully and dependably, but I'd still like to be able to search and replace for other reasons.)

If you're afraid of customers massacring their lists with search and replace, go ahead and make us confirm twice with big scary warnings about how many records are going to be updated and how there's no undo. Heck, make me solve a captcha and upload a video of myself singing The Star Spangled Banner -- I don't care. Just give me some way to manage the data in my lists without going through each subscriber one at a time.

And please click the link at the beginning of this post and add the features I suggested last year too.