Thinking of using Lonely Cat’s Profimail? Think again: their “product” is really a “service” that won’t work unless their servers do, which means you can only check your mail if they allow you to.

Look, I get it: any company that wants to stay in business has to deal with piracy. When the mobile app you spent weeks or months developing suddenly spreads across the mobile landscape free of charge without any revenue coming back upstream, a perfectly good company can suddenly find itself struggling just to stay afloat. But sometimes those perfectly good companies turn to such hairbrained schemes to thwart piracy that they ruin their software—and screw over their paying customers in the process.

Lonely Cat Games did just that when they inadvertently locked out all of their paying customers over the weekend of July 5-6, 2008—an eternity for email. Complaints on their official forum went unanswered, leaving users around the globe echoing each other in empty space. Some were able to find a workaround by  taking advantage of a loophole in the program and bypassing the server-side license check, but unless you were near a computer and able to go onto the LCG forums this weekend you wouldn’t have known about it, and the workaround was slow and only partially restored functionality.

Suddenly, a little before midnight GMT on Sunday July 6th, the application started working again, but LCG still hadn’t posted an explanation or a response.

I use the software, and until this weekend I was a huge fan of Profimail and LCG. I recommended it to anyone with an S60 device. But being locked out of a program I paid for because of bad security programming and poor technical support has turned me off of the company and their apps.

I’m not just being vindictive. I can’t recommend Profimail, or any product from Lonely Cat Games for that matter, for two very important reasons:

1. They claim to sell you software but in actuality you can’t use it without their ongoing permission. This means if they go away tomorrow, so does your ability to use the software (that you paid for).
2. They made this change retroactively to their software and failed to properly alert customers who had already bought the application—they snuck it into an update. In other words, they misled their customers.

In its zeal to prevent piracy, Lonely Cat Games stomped over the rights of its paying customers–the people who play fairly, who pony up real cash for software, and who were trying to support LCG’s business model. Unless LCG changes their software back to the way it was in the past, when buying a license unlocked the app for real, you should avoid any of their programs (the secret license check is built into other LCG products as well).

Or hell, just grab a pirated/cracked copy that you can trust will work properly.