- your email client searching for 15 minutes does not equate to 15 minutes of your searching; work smart, not hard
It's 15 minutes of my computer crunching away at the hard drive, severely impacting any other disk-intensive operations (e.g. compiling code for my "day job") I can perform during that period. Given that my entire "job" is based on sitting at the computer writing/testing/debugging code, bogging down the machine with 8-12 disk-intensive searches per day becomes a problem.
- users can provide their original email address; if they don't / can't, it pretty much eliminates your obligations
Users can save the single email they receive from my key-generation server, rather than me saving thousands of them. My "obligation" was satisfied when I delivered the paid-for key in the first place. Protecting what was paid for is the purchaser's "obligation", not mine.
Deleting them is work. Why aren't they automatically moved to dedicated mailboxes (one per product) and kept there forever (and backed up)? Most email clients have filtering/routing rules, don't they?
They are automatically moved to dedicated locations, then deleted after a couple of weeks - 2 minutes of work every other Wednesday to purge a couple of "folders".
As for "why" they're not kept in those locations forever (and backed up)... because I don't feel that's reasonable to expect. No matter how trivial I might think it is for my local Dodge dealer to give me a new key for my truck, I certainly wouldn't dream of expecting him to keep a stash of "replacement keys" (or grind new ones on demand), for free, in case his past customers happen to lose theirs.
I would think that who paid for what would be considered to be an important business record and I'd want them stored on my PC and in my backups, rather than on some payment provider's system - a system that you have no control over.
I keep those records that are required come tax time: X dollars in "business income" and Y dollars in "business expenses". I declare the income (not itemized by transaction), and keep records of each expense transaction.
If large corporations and the corner drug store don't need to record that Don Starr paid $0.50 for a candy bar on 12 Sept 2008 (and instead just record "received $0.50 on 12 Sept 2008", if it's even itemized that far), then I don't need to keep that type of record. I just need to record $A in income in 2008.
Sounds like customer service to me. Saving emails should be trivial. Searching them should be trivial.
To me, the "customer service" part is offering a fully-functional product for a free trial period, answering technical support questions before and after registration, offering unlimited future upgrades at no cost, adding features as people request them, etc.
Saving a registration key is "customer self service", IMNSHO. And if me saving thousands of emails is trivial, each customer saving a single email should be relatively trivial, as well.
Anyway, just my opinions; it's your biz to run as you see fit and I can see where 8 to 12 requests per day would be a PITA.
2 requests per day became a PITA prior to Mar 2004, when my Win96 program had "hardware-locked" keys. People were, quite understandably, replacing hard drives, network cards, motherboards, and entire PCs. The Win96 keys that depended on those things stopped functioning. At that time (01 Mar 2008), I eliminated the hardware-dependent keys in favor of keys that would work on any machine, any time - they were tied, instead, to user-specific personal information (name, email, street address). I offered every existing Win96 user a "non-hardware-dependent" replacement key, and manually generated these new keys for all users that requested them (at that time, I *did* have records of all registrants - there weren't so many back then).
Personally, I think it's silly to expect any vendor of "online software" to indefinitely maintain and supply on demand a key that's already been delivered, unless they've already said they'd do so. Why is the vendor expected to be the backup service? They lived up to their end of the agreement when they supplied the key that was paid for.
A couple of years ago, I needed to install several paid-for apps on a new PC. I couldn't find my copies of the keys for Adobe Acrobat or Photoshop. I lucked out on Acrobat - I'd purchased it recently enough that Adobe still had the information available online. For Photoshop, I was SOL - I "manned up" and paid for CS2 again; I sure as heck didn't complain online about Adobe's Draconian requirement that I protect what I'd purchased.
In the case of my software, the user must explicitly agree to certain terms before they can register the software. One of these items is an admonishment: "DO NOT LOSE THIS KEY". I don't promise that I'll be able to replace a "lost" key, nor do I even promise a response to a request for one.
