Remove the newsletter subscription offer and email collection from the license registration UI

[gfraiteur]

User story

As a developer setting up or registering my PostSharp license, I am still offered the option to subscribe to the PostSharp newsletter, which requires me to provide my email address. The product should no longer offer a newsletter subscription or collect email addresses at all. I want this option — and everything that handles my email address for it — removed, so that installing and registering PostSharp never asks for or transmits my personal data for marketing purposes.

Current behavior

During license registration (the Settings / license registration wizard shown in Visual Studio):

• A checkbox is presented: "Subscribe to the PostSharp newsletter. No more than two emails per month."
• An email address field is shown, pre-filled by automatically discovering the user's email from the Visual Studio signed-in account, Active Directory, and the Windows registry.
• When consent is given, the email address — together with the product version and the selected areas of interest — is sent to the PostSharp licensing server.

Desired behavior

• The newsletter subscription option no longer appears anywhere in the UI.
• No email address is requested, displayed, or pre-filled for newsletter purposes.
• The product no longer discovers, stores, or transmits the user's email address for newsletter subscription.
• Registering or upgrading a license sends no email address or subscription data to PostSharp servers.

Acceptance criteria

• No newsletter subscription checkbox in the license registration / settings UI.
• No newsletter-related email entry field.
• No email auto-discovery runs for newsletter purposes.
• No request is made to the newsletter subscription endpoint.
• Upgrading from a previous version does not re-send any previously stored email address or consent.
• The removal is documented in the Release Notes.

Notes

• The feature is still fully present and active on release/2024.0; no removal work was found in the git history or in any branch.
• This is a user-facing change to the licensing UI; per the backward-compatibility policy it must be captured in the Release Notes.

— Claude for Gael

[gfraiteur]

Released in v2024.0.24.

-- Claude for Gael

[gfraiteur]

Also released in v2026.0.13, which includes the upstream 2024.0.24 changes.

-- Claude for Gael