MikeDNow then: if I change an email address using that link, by your description there will now be two email addresses associated with that purchase: the one used at time of purchase, and the newly updated one. However, only the newly updated one is actually shown.
In other words, if I change an email address, neither a record of the change, nor the old time-of-purchase address, is indicated. This could be problematic at some point, no? And isn't this the security risk...the lack of a log?
That is exactly what we are avoiding by maintaining your Buyer Group mailing lists completely separately from your Transaction Log data. Buyer emails are added to your Buyer Group list for each item they purchased at the same time we log their order data in the Transaction Log, but those records are not otherwise directly related. When you add, remove or change an email in your Buyer Groups, that does not touch the Transaction Log at all. The original purchase date/time, buyer email, and everything else about the original order is always kept in the Transaction Log; the buyer's current address can be kept and updated as often as you wish in the Mailing List admin screen without affecting your Transaction Log.
The Mailing List admin screen to edit Buyer Group lists is ready for prime-time, or else we wouldn't provide the direct URL to reach it at all. We simply haven't revised Seller Admin to add a link to it yet because Development has been rolling all new features/functions into an all-new, HTML-based Seller Admin they've been working on to replace our current Flash-based Admin panels (which latter are frankly a pain to add anything new to, which is why we're building a new Admin that will be easier for us to modify in the future).
The Transaction Log data must retain all the original order data as-is from the time of the original transaction, or else it really isn't an accurate log of the original transaction data at all anymore. Making the Transaction Log itself directly user-editable just opens a huge can of worms, as we have to consider what misuses and abuses all sorts of scammers, hackers, or just technically-inept or confused users might try to do with that, aside from the bulk of honest, competent users using it correctly and as-intended.
E.g., sellers could mistreat the Transaction Log as a customer-contact database and lose track of their original transaction data or make mistakes changing things in there with either no way to revert, or else we'd have to devise a way to retain a record of previous values for every editable field, which is about the same as the separate Buyer Group vs. Transaction Log records we already maintain anyway, at least for buyer email data. Fraudulent sellers could try to scam people somehow by changing a buyer's order data after they'd received payment, then using that modified record as "proof". We'd have to beef up input-sanitizing to account for the fact that anyone could try to type anything in there rather than just our order-handling scripts doing exactly and only what we programmed them to do. Etc., etc., etc...
We have to devote our limited Development resources where there will be the greatest, most popular/useful, and above all safest result for the least resource-investment sunk. Frankly, making the Transaction Log itself editable would entail a massive effort with potentially serious and wide-ranging security/stability/legal implications, just to add a feature that I can't recall anyone asking about before your interest in it just now, and you apparently only want this feature so you can send a download link to a buyer's new email address, which is like using a Sawzall to do the work of an Xacto knife.
If your primary concern is that you simply want to be able to re-activate a buyer's original download link, but re-send that link to a different email than the buyer's original email address, that seems a reasonable, simple and low-risk feature we could add, so it should get fairly high rank on the wishlist, but we can't promise when or even if it would be added. Meanwhile, you can already do what most other sellers do: use the "Send free download link" function to send a new link to the buyer's current email, and edit your Buyer Group list to update their email if you'll be using our Updates/Newsletter service and want the buyer's current address to be included in those mailings.
