frankie's Journal: Stupid Stupid Password Creatures

Oh damn, did I f*ck up. My dear old Yahoo account is gone.

Way back in the previous millennium, I was pondering the impermanence of college-based email accounts and decided it was finally time to get a free webmail as backup. My college email actually did survive, but that was only due to unforseeable luck and a bit of mild trickery.

Hotmail was supposedly a good service back in the pre-MS era, but I vetoed them for the amount of spam sent by Hotmail throwaways. In fact, my procmail filter was set to auto-reflect anything containing the string hotmail back to their admin addresses... including admin auto-replies. My judo proved to be such a hassle for them that Hotmail's chief techie took the time to contact my postmaster and ask him to ask me to stop. But I digress.

According to many reviews, the very best was Rocketmail. Unfortunately I waited a few months too long, and RM was bought by Yahoo before I opened an account. But I liked Yahoo anyways (having used them since the Akebono days) and signed up.

So for the past 8 years, I've been using Yahoo mail (and later Geocities). And for the past 8 years, I've been storing the same password -- weak, short, all-alpha. On monday I finally decided it was time to secure it. I chose a slight variation of my wetware password algorithm. At the time the new variant seemed perfectly memorable. Turns out it wasn't. D'oh!

Then came the perfect storm. Firefox didn't record the password change, so it was totally lost. Furthermore, I hadn't updated my Yahoo profile for an unknown number of years, and I was unable to guess my own birthday, zip code, and/or secret question. D'oh! D'oh! D'oh!

I wrote to Yahoo customer service for help; they have so far declined to respond. Which led me to spending an hour this morning rooting through cookies and stored passwords for the dozens of sites (Slashdot, iTunes, Paypal, etc) registered under my Yahoo address and changing them to my other emails instead. Argh.

I kinda needed to consolidate my online presence anyways, but this was not the optimal way to do it.