Eudora's patented adware system
John H Meyers
we are all so familiar seems to have had a long history,
and it's been the subject of a hotly contested U.S. Patent,
which ironically seems to have been finally granted
just a month before Qualcomm announced the end of Eudora.
I thought this might be interesting, because a great deal
about the inner workings of the entire system, from
how the registration codes work to the complete strategy
behind the various "nag" behaviors can be gleaned
from looking through the (rather long) text of the patent,
which is a public document, available to everyone.
There seems also to be a strong indication that
older sponsored versions' "reverting to Light mode"
can be prevented, at least under Windows,
which may be of interest to anyone who wants
to continue with an earlier sponsored version,
due to problems they experience with 7.1
United States Patent 7103643
"E-mail software and method and system
for distributing advertisements to client devices
that have such E-mail software installed thereon"
Filed 2000-09-22, Granted to Qualcomm 2006-09-05
http://www.wipo.int/pctdb/en/wo.jsp?KEY=01/43016.010614&ELEMENT_SET=DECL
http://www.patentstorm.us/patents/7103643-description.html
http://www.freepatentsonline.com/7103643.html
Apparently it all started with similar systems
created by both Juno and NetZero, causing
all three companies to be in contention for a patent;
in June 2000, Juno first filed suit against Qualcomm:
http://news.com.com/2100-1023-241299.html
http://www.ecommercetimes.com/story/3465.html
In January 2001, NetZero, in turn,
got a temporary restraining order against Juno
http://telephonyonline.com/news/telecom_netzero_gets_temporary/
But then they merged... and continued the suit against Qualcomm:
http://www.berkeleydailyplanet.com/article.cfm?archiveDate=06-08-01&storyID=5335
Juno's patent application (withdrawn)
http://gauss.ffii.org/PatentView/EP894329
Excerpts from Qualcomm's patent:
Names and dates in registration codes:
RegName is built by concatenating RegFirstName,
a single space, and RegLastName.
RegMonth, the date of the registration,
is expressed as the number of months since Jan. 1, 1999,
e.g., 8 bits (20 years). All 1's is reserved for "never expires"
It should be noted that the software provider
will store registration codes separately for Freeware
(Eudora Light), Adware (Sponsored) and Payware (Eudora Pro)
software modes. Acceptance of a registrations code for one mode
of operation does not imply that the registration codes
for the other modes should be destroyed.
As to whether or not the [Paid mode] registration code
is "valid" for use with a particular version of Eudora,
this is accomplished by comparing the ExpMonth
in the registration code with a BuildMonth field
the software provider will put into the application
[with a one-year leeway]
[...]
The following part is relevant to the forthcoming
"revert to Light" issue, when the Ad servers cease operating:
"Users may have hardware or software problems or other issues
that keep them from fetching ads, or the software provider's
ad servers might even be down for some reason.
Users should not be punished for this.
The software provider will distinguish between these two
situations by asking a simple question, i.e., is the user
sending or receiving mail? If the answer is yes,
the software provider will assume that the blocking of ads
is something the software provider needs to address.
The way the software provider addresses this issue
is with an escalating series of Ad Failure Nags.
These will continue for two weeks
or until the software receives ads.
For every two days the software does [not] receive ads,
the software will decrement the Ad Failure Nag timer by one day.
If the timer runs out, the software will display an apology
to the user, revert to the Freeware version,
and mark the user's software as owned by a Deadbeat User.
Deadbeat Users will only be allowed to return to Adware
if the ad server can be connected to at the time the user
attempts to return to Adware. See FIGS. 17A 17C.
It should be noted that if the software provider
should ever decide to retire Eudora
and wish to let people use it without ads,
the software provider can simply publish
a permanent registration code."
[End of quotes from patent]
If it's true that it takes two weeks without ads
for reverting from Sponsored mode to Light mode to occur,
then certainly we can indefinitely postpone it
by starting Eudora indirectly, via a Windows script,
where the script first strips all the "nag" timers from
Eudora.ini, as is even suggested on Qualcomm's Eudora forum:
http://eudorabb.qualcomm.com/showpost.php?p=15649&postcount=73
http://groups.google.com/group/comp.mail.eudora.ms-windows/browse_thread/thread/3190d62e43d951da
No doubt we can also undo any "deadbeat" code added to Eudora.ini,
should that sometimes happen.
A final ingredient of "no more ads" mode
is deleting any old ads and files,
which otherwise would still display
for as long as still running in Sponsored mode
(the script which I posted also does this)
http://groups.google.com/group/comp.mail.eudora.ms-windows/browse_thread/thread/c8cad06250a7c062
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