Today I was configuring ELMAH to send emails when an exception occurs on my new blog. While looking for the config options, I noticed that a lot of the snippets being posted around suggests people are putting usernames and passwords in their config files to make this work. That's pretty scary! :(

Because SMTP is a bit crap, you don't actually need to authenticate to send email. Most SMTP servers are locked down to stop relaying, but if you deliver directly to the recipients server, the mail will (usually) be accepted anonymously. I sayusually because your email could be rejected based on the From header if something like DomainKeys is set up for that domain.

To configure ELMAH to send mail without authentication, simply look up an MX record for the domain you wish to send the email to, and use that as the SMTP Server. Eg., if you're using Google Apps (like me), you could do something like this:

<errorMail
    from="&quot;Blog Error&quot; &lt;blog+errors@fakedomain.com&gt;"
    to="&quot;Blog Errors&quot; &lt;blog+errors@fakedomain.com&gt;"
    smtpServer="aspmx.l.google.com" />

This means you don't need to put your email username/password in the config file to receive emails about your exceptions.

I recently blogged about the epic saga when I tried to change my email address with Lovefilm. It resulted in me closing my account (for security reasons, not out of spite!).

As the adventure ended, I had another few emails from Lovefilm that I thought I should post, because it just further highlights how bad their customer support is. Don't worry, this one is only three emails :-)

It looks lie some wires got crossed, and after someone already solved my issue (closed my account), I got an email from someone trying to do the same.

From: LOVEFiLM Support
To: Danny Tuppeny

Dear Danny,

Thank you for your email.

We will be happy to investigate this query for you, but at present I'm afraid I am unable to positively identify your account from either the email address you have given "(removed)" (which does not appear to be registered in our database), or from your name as you have supplied it below.

Rather than leaving the issue open, I replied to inform them that everything was sorted.

From: Danny Tuppeny
To: LOVEFiLM Support

Hi,

It looks like the account has already been updated. I was somehow still logged into it, and now my name shows as "Removed Removed" and there is a "videoisland" email address :-)

Danny

I probably could've worded this better, but I thought it was quite clear that the problem had been dealt with. Ofcourse, as I've seen, it doesn't really matter how clearly you explain things to the Lovefilm Customer Service team anyway...

From: LOVEFiLM Support
To: Danny Tuppeny

Dear Danny,

Thank you for your query regarding your account.

I would be happy to provide you with the login details for your DVD Rental account, however before doing so, please can you kindly provide us with the following details below:

1. Your registered first and last name
2. Your registered delivery address with postal code
3. Your recent titles dispatches on your account.

Once we have these details, we shall be able to perform the necessary security checks and provide you with the necessary login details.

Truly gobsmacking. Needless to say, now my account is removed, these guys are on my blocked senders list. I really don't want to hear from them anymore until the learn to read their emails before replying!

At the start of this year, I posted that I had decided to abandon my old ".me.uk" domain in favour of tuppeny.com and dantup.com. It's been a long, painful process updating my email address with all the companies I have accounts with.

However, none of the fun I've previously had can possibly compare with the recent communications with lovefilm.com. I really don't understand how any company can possibly get things so wrong, but I'm posting it here to share with the world.

WARNING: This is quite a long post. This really is how hard it is to change your email address at LOVEFiLM.

Here's a short summary:

Danny: Please change my email address.
Lovefilm: Done. We also changed your password to something insecure.
Danny: Thanks. I can't find a way to change my password to something secure.
Lovefilm: It's on the account page.
Danny: It's not.
Lovefilm: It is.
Danny: It's not.
Lovefilm: Oh, your account is not active, so you cannot change your password.
Danny: Can you please change my password to something more secure, since you changed it?
Lovefilm: You can change it yourself on the account page.
Danny: No, it's not there.
Lovefilm: Oh, sorry. It's on the account page.
Danny: It's really not. Can you change either my password or remove my card details?
Lovefilm: You can change it yourself on the account page.
...

I really don't know if my expectations of companies are too high, but this entire process seems to have been far more difficult than it should be. I'm posting all emails in full, minus the sensitive information. This emails are real. Every. Single. One.

Changing your email address should not be this hard!

From: Danny Tuppeny
To: LOVEFiLM Support

Hi, 

Please can you change my email address. Your help pages say it's possible through the "my account" section, however, if it's there, I can't find it. 

Old email address: (removed)
New email address: (removed)

The old email address will soon stop working, so should I ever decide to reactivate my account, it would be good to have a working email address assigned to my account.

Thanks!

It didn't take long to get a response. Though for some reason, they'd reset my password.

From: LOVEFiLM Support
To: Danny Tuppeny

Dear Danny, 

Thank you for your email.

We are happy to confirm that the registered e-mail address on your account is now changed as '(removed)' and we have manually reset your password to 'lovefilm' (lowercase). We request you to login using this e-mail address and password.

I logged in successfully, and looked for a way to change my password. I tried the "my account" page, the "edit profile" page, and many others. I couldn't find anywhere, so I consulted the help section. The help section suggested there was a "change password" option in the "my account" section. Not so.

From: Danny Tuppeny
To: LOVEFiLM Support

Hi,

I'm unable to find anywhere on your site to change it. I've checked every page under the "my account" section, but none seem to contain a "change password" section.

Is it possible you can send me the URL for the change password page?

A simple request, no?

From: LOVEFiLM Support
To: Danny Tuppeny

Dear Danny,

Thank you for your recent email.

Please accept our sincere apologies for the inconvenience caused to you.

To change the password click on the "my account" link which you will find on the top right hand corner of the screen. Then click onto "change password". Please enter the password and replace with a new one for security reasons.

This wasn't really anything new, but I checked again. There is definitely no option. I wondered if it was related to my account not being active...

From: Danny Tuppeny
To: LOVEFiLM Support

Hi, 

Thanks for the reply. There is no change password link on my "my account" page. I've read through the entire page, and even searched for "password" in both the page, and in the HTML source of the page. 

I don't know whether it's due to something different about my account (such as not having an active package), but the word "password" certainly doesn't exist on the page. 

Please could you advise? 

Thanks

I wasn't really expecting the response I got. It doesn't really make sense. Why would my subscription have any affect on the account password?

From: LOVEFiLM Support
To: Danny Tuppeny

Dear Danny, 

Thank you for your recent email.

We apologise for any inconvenience caused to you.

We are sorry to inform you that you would not be able to change the password on your cancelled account. If you are willing to change the password on your account your account status needs to be active.

Ofcourse, I'm not going to reactivate my subscription just to change my password (especially when it was Lovefilm who set it to something insecure)! I thought the easiest thing would be to let them change it...

From: Danny Tuppeny
To: LOVEFiLM Support

Hi, 

Please can you change my password from "lovefilm" to something more secure. 

I did not ask you to change my password, only my email address. You could not really have changed it to anything less secure, and I'm apparently unable to change my password because I'm not actively paying!

This account has my personal and credit card details in it. Please remove this information or change my password.

Thanks.

I thought that would be the last of it. Boy was I wrong!

From: LOVEFiLM Support
To: Danny Tuppeny

Dear Danny, 

Thank you for your email.

I am very sorry to hear that you are experiencing difficulties whilst logging to your account. Could you please login to your account with the following email address and password. 

Email address : (removed)
Password : lovefilm (lowercase)

To change the password, click on the "my account" link which you will find on the top right hand corner of the screen. Then click onto "change password". Please enter the password and replace with a new one for security reasons.

By this time, I am getting annoyed :-) The response I sent wasn't the most polite I sent, but I just wanted someone to fix my password. This account holds card details and they had changed my password to something stupid.

From: Danny Tuppeny
To: LOVEFiLM Support

Hi, 

This is getting rediculous. Do you guys not read the previous emails being replied to? 

There is no option for me to change my password. Someone from your company confirmed that the "change password" option only exists when you have an ACTIVE subscription. 

I do not have an active subscription. YOUR COMPANY changed my password to the NOT SECURE "lovefilm" WITHOUT MY REQUEST.

This account has my credit card details and personal details.

Either change my pasword to something more secure, or remove my details. I cannot change my password myself - we have already established that - because I do not have an active account. 

It appears to me that Lovefilm do not give a shit about the security of their customers details. 

I'm sorry for the tone of my email, but this is the 5th email I've sent. I never requested my password to be reset, and despite explaining many times that the change password option is NOT on the "my account" page, we seem to be going in circles. 

For some reason, I got two responses this time. As you can guess, they were both as helpful as each other!

From: LOVEFiLM Support
To: Danny Tuppeny

Dear Danny, 

Thank you for your recent e-mail.

Please accept our apologies for any inconvenience caused.

I can confirm to you that, I have made necessary changes to allow you to change the password. To change the password, click on the "my account" link which you will find on the top right hand corner of the screen. Then click onto "change password". Please enter the password and replace with a new one for security reasons.

Of course, I checked. There is still no instance of the word "password" on the page, or in the HTML source. I'm not even sure why they would need to make changes to allow me to change my password. Either way, it hadn't worked. Here's the second email:

From: LOVEFiLM Support
To: Danny Tuppeny

Dear Danny, 

Thank you for your email regarding your account. I apologise for any inconvenience caused.

I would kindly ask you to refrain from using such expletives when contacting us in the future. 

When you need to change your email address through ourselves, we have to also change your password to make sure you can access the account. This is to make sure that you can access the account and do not need to contact us again in regards to the same query.

Once you have logged into your account, you can go to "my account" and change your password to whatever you want. We do not advise customers to keep the password we have provided them for security reasons.

Well, it looks like our little loop is going to continue. They explained why they changed my password in the first place, but they then repeated the same thing. By this point, I really don't know whether to laugh or cry... I have lost all faith in Lovefilm. I sent yet another reply, hoping this will be the end of it...

From: Danny Tuppeny
To: LOVEFiLM Support

Hi, 

There is still no option to change my password on the "my account" page. I have even searched the HTML source of the page, and there is no instance of the word "password". 

I really don't understand how I can make this any clearer. This is the seventh email. I can send you a screenshot of the my account page (or the HTML source) if you wish. The option is really not there.

If you are unable to fix this, then I demand that you remove all of my address and credit card details from your system immediately. I do not wish to have these details compromised because of the incompetence of your company. 

Needless to say, I will not, ever, by reactivating my lovefilm subscription. 

I thought this one was pretty clear. Fix my password, or remove my details. I don't want this to go on any longer. For some reason it seems Lovefilm wanted further confirmation!

From: LOVEFiLM Support
To: Danny Tuppeny

Dear Danny,

Thank you for your recent email.

I am very sorry but you will not be able to change the password on an
inactive account via the website. I can see that we have changed the
password on the account to lovefilm, as you requested that the email
address be updated to your new email address. When we update an email
address then we will change the password to allow you to have access to
your account.

Could you please respond to this email confirming that you are looking
for all your details to be removed from our database.

Well, you can't say I didn't try. The funniest thing about this email, was the signature:

Have we done something that's really made you go 'WOW'?  Why not nominate us for an award?  The WOW awards are the only Customer Service awards based on your nominations.  Go to http://www.thewowawardswebs.co.uk/lovefilm to find out more.

My final email, was of course to confirm that I would like to have my account closed. Lovefilm have lost me as a customer, for life. This was a shocking experience, and I hope it's not commonplace at Lovefilm. In my reply, I summarised the stupid things they'd done, in the hope that someone might care enough to fix things.

From: Danny Tuppeny
To: LOVEFiLM Support

Hi,

Thanks for the reply. I can confirm that I would like you to completely close my account. All my credit card details, address details, email address, etc., should be removed from your system.

I really hope your company cares enough to learn from this experience. I had a simple request to change my email address, and your company failed very badly in many, many ways.
 
You changed my password without me asking.
 
You changed my password to something completely insecure.
 
You changed my password and told me to reset it, despite the fact I am unable to change my password.
 
It took over 15 emails back and forwards before your company was able to resolve this issue, because none of my emails were read correctly.
 
The resolution was a lost customer, and a deleted account. It should have been a changed email address and a happy customer.
 
This is incredibly disappointing, and not something I would expect from a company of your size.

I hope you don't mind that I'm going to post a full account of everything that happened, including all emails sent by both parties, in full, to my blog. This epic adventure needs to be shared.

Thanks,

Danny

I finally got an email confirming my account would be deleted "as soon as possible". While that means nothing to me, I have been to visit (and I was still logged in), and I can see my card details are gone, and my name is set to "Removed Removed" with a "videoisland" email address. finally!

I recently posted about some failure in changing my email address on various big-name websites. One of those, was Blizzard's Battle.net system, used to login to Blizzard games such as World Of Warcraft. The problem was that an error was occuring, but the error text was not displayed:

This problem has now been fixed, so today I was able to see what the actual error was:

"Your password cannot by the same as your email address"

Now, I know what you're thinking. What am I doing having my email address as my password? Well, I don't. However, if you ignore case, the first few characters were the same. Looks like this was the problem all along.

Now I knew what the problem was, it was easy enough to change my password, and then I could successfully change my email address.

+1 to Blizzard for fixing the error message not displaying, but -1 for not making it very clear. I thought the validation was working against the wrong input boxes for a minute. Better wording would be that "your password cannot contain part of your email address" or similar.

I'm just happy I managed to fix it before having to share the old, defunct address for Real ID :-)

A few months back, I blogged about changing domains and over the last few months I've been slowly updating email addresses at all the sites I have accounts for to a new domain. Rather than using a catchall this time, I decided to go with plus addressing. This means I can allow catchall mail to be swallowed (which will reduce the amount of spam I see) while still maintaining individual addresses for filtering/blocking purposes.

Microsoft Email Fail

Update (5th September 2011): I've since been able to fix this problem by signing up again at domains.live.com and proving I owned the domain, and then closing the account. Looks like it was a result of signing up to Windows Live Custom Domains thing may years ago!

Today I came to update the email addresses associated with my Microsoft passports (Live IDs, whatever they're called this week). My current addresses all end with dantup.me.uk (which won't be renewed), and I wanted to change them to be an address at my new domain.

I found the correct page to change my email address. It was a bit frustrating that I had to type my password (the form doesn't allow pasting), but I can live with that. What I can't live with, is being told I can't use my email address! Note: This is unrelated to using a plus in the email address, since it happens without it.

Unfortunately there's very little information in the error to help me track this down. I have absolutely no idea what the problem could be. If Microsoft are no longer allowing custom email addresses, then the radio option shouldn't be there. If my domain has been somehow blacklisted - I'd love to know why!

Unfortunately the help links all point to stupid FAQs and help pages, with no visible way of contacting Microsoft with these kind of issues. The issue is annoying on its own, but when you're a company the size of Microsoft, not having a way for a user to contact you with these sorts of problems is inexcusable.

Blizzard Battle.net Email Fail

OK, time to try updating my Battle.net/World of Warcraft email address. World of Warcraft accounts were recently merged into Battle.net accounts, so the website is all fairly new. Similar form to the Microsoft one, though it asks for the answer to my secret question. I complete all fields correctly and click Save. Doh! An error. Unfortunately, there's no error text - just a box! Note: This is unrelated to using a plus in the email address, since it happens without it.

I checked on Google and it seems I'm not the only one with this problem. Some people had joy changing browser or clearing caches, but I'm stuck with the problem in IE8 and Chrome regardless. Most of the responses from Blizzard employees in the forums just ask the player to phone them rather than actually trying to track down the issue. Well done, Blizzard.

Facebook Email Fail

OK, Facebook went a little smoother. I could change my email address. What I couldn't do, however, was use a plus in my email address. Just in case you're wondering, here's what the specs say about plusses in email addresses:

Without quotes, local-parts may consist of any combination of alphabetic characters, digits, or any of the special characters

! # $ % & ' * + - / = ? ^ _ ` . { | } ~

Looks pretty clear to me. Plusses are valid. Let's see what Facebook have to say about this in a reply to someone that's already notified them of this bug in their website.

Well, it's quite clear Facebook don't give a shit. "There are no exceptions to this rule". Well that's just super. They may as well have said "We can't be arsed fixing our site, so please change your email address". This kinda of attitude is pathetic from a company this big. What's wrong with "Thanks for the report - I'll pass this on to the correct team and we'll see what they can do"? If you're not going to fix it, at least lie to us.

Other Email Fail

Unfortunately, the email fail doesn't end there. Here's a few other sites/apps/games that don't allow plusses in email addresses I've come across just since January:

• Facebook
• Dominos Pizza
• Square Enix Final Fantasy MMO Beta Signup
• Lord of the Rings Online MMO
• Aika MMO
• Perfect World MMO
• Mersey Tunnels FastTag
• Swiftcover Car Insurance
• Argos online reservation
• Xbox Live

I'm sure there are many, many more. I'd like to send emails to them all and let them know (from an email address containing a plus, ofcourse) but based on the Facebook response above, I'm really not sure it's worth the effort.