We had to disable the email-sending function of our Send Free Download Link/Code feature, as spammers were abusing that to send masses of spam, which caused our recent outbound-email outage from the evening of Jan. 9 to the morning of Jan. 12.

However, you can still use that feature to generate a free link, then just copy the link URL generated when it's displayed there, and paste that into a personal message to the buyer. Note you can simply right-click on that link URL (or Control-click on a Mac) and select Copy Link, rather than having to drag-select the URL manually to copy it.

Any free links/codes you issue will also be stored in your Free Downloads Log as usual, where you can copy the issued link from the Transaction ID and/or copy the issued code from the Key column.

Our Devs hope to devise some way to re-enable generating emails for free links/codes in a way that can't be abused by spammers again.

If any buyers are not finding the original email with their link -- and assuming they didn't purchase during our recent email outage -- you can advise them to check their Spam/Junk Mail folder in case their message wound up there, and mark it as Not Spam/Junk if so.

You can also find any buyer's order in your E-junkie Transaction Log and click the Reactivate Links button, which will also offer an option to resend thank-you email(s) for that order, or just click the Copy Link button for their order and paste that into a personal reply to the buyer.

Yes, emails are still disabled for sending free links/codes, but you can still use that feature to generate a free link, then just copy the link URL generated when it's displayed there, and paste that into a personal message to the buyer.

Any free links/codes you issue will also be stored in your Free Downloads Log as usual, where you can copy the issued link from the Transaction ID there and/or copy the issued code from the Key column.

We agree the interface could be clearer about the fact that no emails will be sent for free links, and have referred that suggestion to our Devs along with some more specific ideas for that improvement.

Sorry for the trouble; that 403 error would have been due to the issues our system was experiencing last night into early this morning and/or our engineers' attempts to resolve it -- see our followup report on that event here:

You can still use this feature to generate a free link, then just copy the link URL generated when it's displayed there, and paste that into a personal message to the recipient. Note you can simply right-click on that link URL (or Control-click on a Mac) and select Copy Link, rather than having to drag-select the URL manually to copy it.

Our Devs have not informed us if or when they will be able to devise a way to re-enable generating emails for free links in a way that can't be abused by spammers again. Most likely they'd have to implement a "prove you're a human" CAPTCHA, or else just limit it to sending our default Product Thank-you Email message without any option for customizing the message.

The spammers were not paying subscribers. They were registering new accounts as single-use "throwaways" to abuse our free trial period for sending spam, then they'd abandon the account before the free trial expired and start over with a new account, then repeat this again and again.

They also seemed to be going through a "bot net" comprising multitudes of malware-infected computers worldwide to make every account registration and spam batch appear to come from a different IP address, making it impossible to cut off this activity by blocking any particular IPs.

I will refer your other suggestions to our Dev team for consideration.

Thanks for the suggestion; we'll refer that to our Devs for consideration.

Meanwhile, if you're only resending links to prior buyers, you can already do that from your E-junkie Transaction Log. Just find their order there and click the Reactivate Links button for that, which will give you an checkbox you can tick to Resend Thank-you Emails to the buyer along with their reactivated link.