Quitting Cable: All The Terrible That Comes With Changing Your Email Address

For ten years, I’ve had an earthlink email address as my primary junk email address. Every service I’ve ever signed up for on the web has been that Earthlink account. Because Time Warner cable won’t let you upgrade from Earthlink standard cable modem service to WideBand service, I’ve decided to cancel everything, and sign up as a new customer. So, I am in the process of updating my email address for every website with which I have an account. Most go pretty smoothly, but there are definitely some glitches.

AngelList: Security Oops

I made a typo when I typed in my email address, so I was unable to re-login into AngelList. There was no email confirmation box, and they don’t send a confirmation email to your old email address. So, I had no idea what was wrong. That part doesn’t bother me so much, but the fact that I was able to hit the back button 10 times, and get to the logged-in view of my account settings page, then click edit and see all of my settings has me seriously concerned. (I was not able to change anything at that point) That is a serious security lapse.

Also, I’m not sure what I’m supposed to do on AngelList, I just know that as a software engineer, I’m supposed to love them and think they’re doing so much for our industry.

Yahoo Groups: UX Fail

I am forced to have a Yahoo Groups account because my co-op’s distribution list is on Yahoo Groups. I love this error:

Apparently, Yahoo won’t let you save an email address with Yahoo in the name. Brilliant! Also, perhaps not surprisingly, once I did select an acceptable email address, the process of changing it over was a UX nightmare, and I somehow received 10 emails from Yahoo in the process.

One more thing: In case you were wondering: No, you cannot change your Yahoo ID. So, yes you are stuck with the awful one you chose for fantasy baseball 12 years ago.

Facebook: No you don’t know my password

Facebook… I just signed in. I know I typed my password in correctly. So I can’t add a new email address. I’m really looking forward to my #leavingfacebook series.

GroupMe: Yikes on Email Templates

My buddy @whereandy works for GroupMe, so I definitely gave him hell over the 1997 email change confirmation email:

Here are some of the other, less-notable glitches I encountered:

• SlideShare doesn’t have different email templates for their new user confirmation email and existing user changes email address verification, so I got a silly “Welcome to SlideShare”
• Columbia ACIS has not updated their interface since I was in college. Spoiler: It’s still terrible.
• Seamless: Unless I’m blind, I cannot find a way to change my account email address. Lame.

In any case, its a long process. I’ve been at it for over a week and I’m still getting emails to that old Earthlink account.