Stalker,

here's a suggestion for you future Timebomb implementations.

In the future, please have the Timebomb explode at 10:00 local server time.
That way, an administrator can deal with the problem which is important as
we consider Email a business critical application.

Having a timebomb explode at midnight GMT is bad since as a european, i am
usualy in bed at that time and have better things to do than babysitting my
mailserver.

Thank you so much!

--
Stefan Seiz <http://www.StefanSeiz.com>
Spamto: <b...@imd.net>

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It seems that the problem is:

1) Stalker has not clearly explained the rules & consequences involved in
their licensing.

2) Possibly Stalker has not sufficiently warned it's customers about a
license related crashing bug and how to avoid it.

2) The log does not give a hint as to why it shut down "unexpectedly" due
to a timebomb.

3) Stalker tech support is not immediately available 24/7 to explain that
your server was time bombed and what to do about it.

4) For years, Stalker tech support has always recommend all users upgrade
to the latest version - without regard to how long ago you purchased it.

5) When your mailserver shuts down, you don't your mail, and you don't
get your CGP list mail either. This can leave you completely in the dark,
so you spend all night & the next day trouble-shooting the server.
Difficult because it quits every few minutes. Also completely unnecessary
horrible treatment of customers. This is not a good way to get customers
to pay for an upgrade. Neither is raising the prices 5x.

Suggestions to Stalker:
------------------------
1) Clearly explain the rules of how the license works. Post it on the website.

2) Announce well in advance of any timebomb dates and versions. Announce
it again shortly before the deadline. Send emails to customers who have
not upgraded recently explaining what will happen and their choices of
action. not everybody reads the CGP-talk list daily.

3) Make it clear what will happen, when, to who, and what the choices
are. Clear communication is GOOD.

4) If a time bomb is going to be detonated, the log files or dialog box
should make it very clear what is happening, This can save hours & days
of frustration and further damage while trying to diagnose & fix the problem.

5) There is no good reason to cause your customers unnecessary pain.
There are better ways to keep business than a surprise kick in the groin.

6) If this timebomb was in fact, a known but accidental bug, Stalker
should have warned all users of the bug and how to fix it BEFORE the bomb
goes off. Every one of us has an email address on file with Stalker from
when we registered the CGP server software. It doesn't seem unreasonable
for an email server company to send an email to it's customers,
especially if it can save many hours of pain and suffering.

Best,
 Dave Nathanson
 Mac Medix

in reply to (TalkLi...@index-s.de), Stefan Seiz's message of 2:08 AM, 2/1/05

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Naaah.

What happened to the honesty and the good software that attracted us to
Stalker in the first place?

Questions for Stalker:

1) Many members of staff are on this list -- why didn't you warn us or did
you think it was clever to wait and see?
2) Why didn't the software warn us?
3) Why don't you tie in the licence key into features rather than version
numbers -- that way people can stay up to date with the core fixes?

Quiet frankly I used to be a huge advocate of Stalkers and managed a 30,000
user licence set-up for a number of years.  Now I distrust the company and
their actions and cannot recommend them.

The whole point of staying with a supplier is to minimise costs and avoid
migration costs, but many of us suffered email outages today.
I am more inclined to migrate away than spend further money with Stalker.

Just so we can all put a note in our diaries, when does 4.2.8 time bomb?
Let's have a straight answer this time please.

James

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Hello,

On Tue, 1 Feb 2005 22:18:19 -0000
  "James Gardiner" <ja...@womble.org> wrote:

Excuse me - warn you about what? About the fact that:
a) it's not legal to use software with invalid license Keys?
b) that while we tend to ignore the violations of (a), we will not ignore
them in future?

The answer: while I do not think that it's our responsibility to warn about
(a), we DID warn you. We also warned you about (b) and that we will be
enforcing the Licensing Policy. This created a stream of aproximately 500
messages on this list - 3 month ago. They are still in the archives.

We also created a special mailing list for those who wanted to discuss the
Licensing policies and had questions about it. One of the participants of
that discussion was you. The message #27 in that list is your posting:

==========================================================================
Return-Path: <ja...@womble.org>
Date: Sun, 31 Oct 2004 19:01:54 +0000
From: James Gardiner <ja...@womble.org>
To: Stalker Licensing Policies <pric...@mail.stalker.com>
Subject: Re: Access to new CommuniGate Pro releases, without groupware
Message-ID: <20041031190154.GA16429@womble.org>
Mail-Followup-To: James Gardiner <ja...@womble.org>,
        Stalker Licensing Policies <pric...@mail.stalker.com>
References: <list-30676221@mail.stalker.com>
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
In-Reply-To: <list-30676221@mail.stalker.com>
X-Mailer: CommuniGate Pro CLI mailer

Hello Vladimir,

Just for clarification purposes will a feature enabled by a
license key ever expire?  (I understand that new features may
need a recent key)

Regards
James
==========================================================================

So, IMHO, saying that "we did not warn" is not quite correct. Everything was
discussed, and the traffic on that subject (on both mailing lists) stopped
in few days - so we could assume that all questions were answered. Those who
still had questions asked them via E-mail or by calling our sales office.

About what? If we warned you explicitly, via a 10-days discussion, what else
could some software do?

Again, this topic did emerge in Nov-2004, on both mailing lists, and
everything was discussed that time. We can disucss it again, but this has
little to do with the today topic.

This is your right. I'd like, though, to see any example where we as a
company did anything contrary to any agreement we had with our customers. I
can see the cases where we did much more than our Agreement required us to
do - i.e. support people with invalid licenses for years, not enforcing the
Licensing Policy immediately even after warning all users that we will
enforce it, etc. If this is the source of your distrust, then I have no
agree with you - we are dishonest.

That's absolutely up to you.

If you have License Keys that are valid for 4.2.8, you can use it as long as
you want. If you use it with invalid License Keys, you are violating our
Agreeent (for many months, and after explicit warning that you are in
violation), and your software may work fine, or it may not work fine - it's
not something we can or will discuss.

We told you this same thing 3 months ago, and we are telling you the same
thing right now. You want suprises - we cannot stop you from creating lots
of surpises for yourself. If you do not want surprises, then please use only
the software you have a valid license for.

Sincerely,
Vladimir

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Ummm... surprises???  Can you direct me to the document that says that
even though, by your policy adjustment, I am entitled to run all
versions up to 4.2.8, my server shutdown running 4.2.5 with no
warning???  And, oh by the way, you should upgrade to 4.2.8 to avoid
this???  I watched this whole licensing thing rather passively and given
the end result, assumed I was ok.  In fact, I only upgraded to 4.2.5
rather than 4.2.8 because the last thing I read said I was good with
anything released until Nov 30th, 2004.  Then, without warning 4.2.5
stops, over and over....  did I miss a document somewhere???  If I did,
I apologize for this post.  Please point it out to me so I can look like
the @#$% and not Stalker....

On Feb 1, 2005, at 7:21 PM, Vladimir A. Butenko wrote:

Vladimir,
I must disagree with you. We do not need answer for a) or b). Stefan
and the rest of your customer are correct in asking for the warning
instead we get denials and refusal to listen.

We need be warned that certain version of  CommuniGate Pro example:
4.2.5 will stop functioning even if one has up-to-date license. I was
using CommuniGate Pro SMTP 4.2.5 and I have  up-to-date license. My
server stop functioning just like everyone else who do not have  
up-to-date license.

We need to be informed that the software stop functioning because its
license has expired. At least say it in the log file so we dont waste
time looking around at the wrong places.

We need to be notified that we must upgrade to certain version to avoid
certain time bomb on certain version of software because some policy
change or bugs in the software.

We got none of these warnings nor apologies. Instead we get arrogant
denials and blames from Stalker for using illegal software. How is it
that my use of CommunigatePro become illegal when I just paid for
upgrade in Nov 15, 2004 and installed the license on the same day ?

Hanz

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On Tue, 1 Feb 2005 20:32:42 -0500
  Hanz Makmur <makmur+stal...@cs.rutgers.edu> wrote:

We had to investigate what happened that with your License. So, we our your
an apology in any case, and please accept one.

You, indeed, got a new License in Nov'2004. Formally speaking, the License
Keys are valid for the "current version and versions released with x
months". That time 4.2.6 was the current version. If you were not warned
once again, that you must have a current version in order to run new keys,
it was our fault :-(.

Usually, it's not that strict and you can run older versions with newer keys
(except when it's oviously impossible - like a new License Key type, such as
CommuniGate with Groupware). Unfortunately, 4.2.5 did a strange things that
was discovered only recently, long after that version stopped to be the
current and supported one: if it had 2 License Keys, it used the first one.
So, your new Key was just ignored there. If you would remove the old one,
the new Key would become effective.

When we discovered the problem, we tried to contact all customers that could
be affected. But because you bought your upgrade when 4.2.6 was current and
because we ASSUMED (wrongly) that you would run the current version after
upgrade (sorry again if it was not told to you explicitly), you were not
notified :-(

Sincerely,
Vladimir

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Tue, 01 Feb 2005 18:35:24 -0800
Vladimir A. Butenko <vladimir_bute...@stalker.com>wrote:

Vlad,

After reading the listserver most of the day, I want to
share a few observation from our end. We like your
product. We missed having this problem by a couple days
and some luck. We too purchased a new license in Dec 2004,
entered the new keys under the old keys, and continued to
use 4.2.5. An email from Dmitry said it would be cleaner
to remove the old ones, but it wouldn't hurt anything.
Since the keys had already been entered, we didn't go back
and change it. It sounds like that exact scenario would
have stopped our server too. However, we upgraded to 4.2.8
late last week and avoided the problem by pure chance.

Please don't, don't, don't ASSUME that everyone does an
upgrade IMMEDIATELY upon your release. We always follow
this list watching for new problems before upgrading and
because of that, we choose not to do 4.2.6 or 4.2.7.  Last
week we decided we could live with the problems that 4.2.8
had and did the upgrade a couple days before the problem
happened.

A simple statement to this listserver, (when you realized
the problem and fixed it) that said 4.2.5 or 4.2.6 would
stop if the old license keys were not removed from the top
of the list would have solved that problem.

We are among those customers that did everything right. We
purchased license upgrades, etc. and WE JUST GOT LUCKY and
upgraded in the nick of time.  PLEASE DON'T ASSUME that
everybody jumps at the new upgrade instantly. As a system
admin it is not in my best business interests. My
organization doesn't want me to be a beta tester for new
versions. That is why we always delay our upgrades,
because every new version recently has fixed previous
problems and introduced new problems.

I will continue my delayed upgrades, and I hope next time
I'm just in time again. I must assume 4.2.8 has some
license checking mechanism in it, but at a later date than
4.2.5 and 4.2.6 used.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Marvin Pillers ------ Garfield-Palouse Cooperative Schools

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Vladimir,

Apologies accepted.

I think my situation is not unique. Not every one updates to new
release as soon as it is out. I suspect many more users are in the same
situation as I am and they deserve a public apology as well. This is
the only way to amend this situation.

One action that bugs me a lot is the fact that Stalker intentionally
shutdown the server for its paying customer and let non paying customer
go on using the software. Had I run  version 4.2.5 without license key,
my server will continue working just fine in unlimited trial mode.

Here my questions/suggestions:

Why can't Stalker simply put all out of licensed server back to this
friendly "Trial Mode" or "Out of License Mode" instead of shutting down
the server with unexplained error ?

I believe Trial Mode or  Out of License mode is an acceptable solution
for everyone instead of the draconian shutdown solution which makes
everyone upset. I see that no one is happy with this draconian
incident, not stalker, not your paying customers. This is a no win
solution. Had Stalker think about the friendly reminder mode above,
Stalker will win big and it will also put postmaster of the system in
embarrassing situations for having expired license. The longer it is
delayed, the worse it gets. Imagine the thousands of email being
sent/received with the friendly reminder of expired license. Who do you
think will come begging for new license ?

I think it is time that Stalker treat its paying customer better than
its non paying customer.

Hanz

On Feb 1, 2005, at 9:35 PM, Vladimir A. Butenko wrote:

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