Barely two weeks after praising freeware spam-catcher program ChoiceMail, a Reuters columnist has zapped the program for a hard-to-find feature: The program tacks an advertisement for itself onto users' outgoing e-mail.
"ChoiceMail Free… puts a 22-word commercial for the product at the end of every e-mail you send," wrote Gene Emery June 29. "Because of the way ChoiceMail works, you may never realize that your e-mail has become a continuous commercial for ChoiceMail. I stumbled onto it only after I sent an e-mail reminder to myself at another address."
And you won't catch it when you go to your Sent folder, either, Emery said. The program tacks on the "perpetual billboard" after the e-mail is sent. Moreover, Emery added, even after deactivating the program, the advertisement was still being tacked onto his outgoing e-mail.
"Personally," he wrote, "I don't like to be treated as an advertising vehicle unless someone asks my permission first," he said, saying the ChoiceMail licensing agreement never mentioned it.
The good news is, Emery raised the problem with ChoiceMail maker DigiPortal, and the company agreed to make more visible an almost undetectable warning that the program includes a ChoiceMail signature line on outgoing messages.
Despite the change, Emery wrote that the whole thing was one more way too many software makers think they can take liberties with customer computers once their programs are loaded and operating.
