GenSmarts Genealogy Software


Changing Your EMail Address

GenSmarts website uses an email address for two different purposes:

1) Our support list and GenSmarts Support newsletter. These are the same list. Our anti-spam policies require that you change your email on this list yourself. For instructions on how to do this, look at the bottom of our latest newsletter. You will receive a confirmation email which you must reply to after making the change. This process prevents us or someone else from signing up people who don't want to be on the list. Many of the big ISP's (e.g. AOL) require that we follow such a process or they won't deliver mail from us.

2) If you forget your key, we don't mind letting you automatically resend it to the same email address that was used to purchase it. We will not let you send your name/key information to any other email address, as we have no way of validating that it's really you that's requesting it... it could simply be someone trying to steal your name/key. So there's no way to change the email address our automated key retrieval uses. If you no longer have the email address you used at purchase time and lost your name/key... you'll have to use our manual request form. Or, better yet, treat your name/key just like you would a CD and don't loose it.


A further comment on key retrieval...

Some people may wonder why we don't simply upgrade our key retrieval mechanism and allow an authenticated way for someone to change their email and retrieve their key. An example might be to use some other personal information, such as the credit card used at purchase time, that would only be known to the original customer. Well, besides the fact that we don't keep customer personal information online, the whole point of being able to offer a cheaper price on the download only (as opposed to the CD) is that it's cheaper for us as well... and investing in an elaborate key storage and retrieval system would defeat our ability to offer the download at a cheaper price. We still are doing manual verification/lookups for free, at least for now, as long as people don't abuse it too much.