Support

Getting help

One address, answered by a person, within 1–2 working days

Start inside the app

Open Help from the bottom of the left-hand rail, or from the activation screen if you have not activated yet. It has three sections, because there are three different things people need:

• Questions — the answers to what people ask most often, without leaving the app.
• Report a problem — builds a diagnostic report describing what went wrong.
• Share an idea — goes to a different queue than bug reports, so it does not quietly drown.

What is in a diagnostic report

The report is assembled on your machine, in plain text, and shown to you before anything is sent. You can read every line of it and edit it. Nothing leaves your computer until you choose to send it.

It carries your ShiftMask version, Windows version, the last error the app showed you, and the shape of what you were working on — how many files, how many columns. It contains no values from your data; the report has nowhere to put them. Column names appear only as salted digests, so we can tell two columns apart without learning what either is called.

Each report gets a reference number. Quote it if you write to us again about the same thing.

Three ways to send it

• Copy to clipboard — paste it into whatever mail client you actually use, on whatever machine you use for mail.
• Save to a file — for machines where mail happens somewhere else entirely.
• Open in your mail client — prepares the message. It never attaches the whole report by itself; you paste that in, having read it.

If this machine has no mail client

Write to shiftmask@4optima.pl from any other machine or from your phone. Two things make the difference between a fast answer and a slow one:

Put the right marker in the subject line. It is read automatically, so please keep the square brackets and do not translate it:

[ShiftMask problem]      a bug or something not working
[ShiftMask idea]         a feature request
[ShiftMask licence]      activation, or moving a licence to a new computer
[ShiftMask contact]      anything else

Start the message with this block, filled in. Leave a line empty if it does not apply, but keep the line itself — it is read automatically, and a missing key is easier to handle than a guessed one:

--- SHIFTMASK-DATA v1 ---
kind: problem
source: manual
name:
company:
email:
version:
--- END ---

Then write what happened, in your own words, underneath. If you have a diagnostic report saved to a file, paste it after that.

Moving a licence to a new computer

A licence covers one machine, and the token is tied to the device ID shown on the activation screen. When you replace the machine, we issue a new token — there is no limit on this, and no charge. Hardware fails and laptops get stolen; a limit would punish the people that happens to without stopping anyone acting in bad faith.

ShiftMask prepares the whole request for you. Open Help, or use the transfer button on the activation screen, and send the message it builds. Send it from the address you bought with — that address is what links the request to your order. You get a new token within one working day.

Things we cannot do

Recover a lost vault password. Not by you, not by us, not by anyone. That is a property of the encryption rather than a missing feature — if we could recover it, so could someone who should not. ShiftMask asks you to type the password twice when a vault is created and warns you at that moment, because that is the last point at which anything can be done about it.

See your data. There is no copy of it anywhere but your own disk, so we cannot look at the file that caused the problem. This is why the diagnostic report describes the shape of what you were working on — it is the most we can know, by design.

Where else to look

• Frequently asked questions — the short answers, on the main page.
• Installing on a machine with no internet — including the failure that trips up almost everyone.
• Roadmap — what is planned, before you ask for it.