I am in the final phases of a little vertical market app. The plan is offer an evaluation download.

At some point, the activation "scheme" will transact with a server (i guess), but for now my plan is to keep it simple and I would appreciate any feed back, advice or warnings!

The users will be home-sales-consultants. The OS will be late Win2K(maybe) and XP Home/Pro.

After install and at first start-up, the app will generate a key. Information collected by CDO and userinfo will be sent "outside" the user mail client using code very similar to the DLL sample "SendMail.PRG" on wiki.

The SMTP will mail me and the user's email account from the users email account and user's smtp.server.com!:

oCDO=CREATEOBJECT('CDO.Message')
cServer = oCDO.Configuration.Fields(15).UnderlyingValue && User's smtp
cSender = oCDO.Configuration.Fields(13).UnderlyingValue    && User's email
cRecipient = "myemailaddress@.....", cSender &&(me and the user get a copy)

The user will accept to send the information. Following the send, the user and I will recieve an email with a subject line "Your activation key", and will include in the textbody the activation key (generated at first start-up) and the info collected by CDO and userinfo functions.

It boils down to the user is really mailing themselves and me a "key" that was generated when they installed the system.

It's cheap - SMTP is stealthy - it works - am I missing anything?
Thanks