According to the CoE they were told once, authoritatively, on September 17th after months of work on the ad and campaign. What is obvious from the email of Aug 3rd is that up to that time there was no such policy and that DCM lied in their response to criticism when they claimed the policy had been in place 'for years'. It is also obvious that the writer of that email wrongly thought that the issue was with the distributors not DCM and continued to negotiate the price presumably because he thought that difficulty might be overcome.