Thanks for your thoughts about Wordfence.
As we mentioned in our blog post, the installation process was changed because scaling up our operations has required us to get better at capacity planning. That means knowing how many installations we’re getting, how many are bots or spam, who is communicating with our servers during a scan, and whether it is a real website running Wordfence, a nulled plugin or someone simply using our resources to power something unrelated to Wordfence. It wasn’t changed as a marketing gimmick and much thought was put into it. Being able to scale appropriately to ensure capacity for all our users, free included is important. Akismet does it too so it’s not like this is radically different from the norm in the WordPress space.
I looked but can’t seem to find an email from you to our team about this issue or a post in the forums at www.remarpro.com. Without some details we can’t even begin to tell you what happened. I can tell you as of Tuesday (the last numbers I have available to me) there were thousands of free license emails successfully sent. We only had 87 emails that bounced – rejected by the requesting user’s mail server for things like the mailbox being full, etc. Additionally, only 102 emails were not sent (A hard bounce email address is when the email address is invalid or doesn’t exist, for example if the address was mistyped). Neither of these, a hard bounce or soft bounce, are things we can control. Making sure that a valid email address was entered and double checking it before clicking to send the email is very important to the process. I can’t say any of that is applicable to your situation but if you do wish to email us at feedback [at] wordfence [dot] com with the email you used we can tell you if the email was sent successfully or not, as well as provide any reasons for the bounce we can see.
Thanks!
Mia
