Colleagues to the rescue

A potential catastrophhy (to me, not to anyone else) was averted today by colleagues in the States. I don't know whether anyone noticed, but a set of users of a prominent free email service provider were victimized last weekend by a spammer. Not your ordinary annoying spammer who just clutters up the In Box.  But one who made the spam look like it came from the victim, and, placed a copy of the spam in the Sent items folder. The result for me was a panicked dash to change my password, convinced that my identity was in imminent danger of loss, along with all my money and my life. I think my husband would have stuck by me, but I suspect he'd be annoyed.

I did a great job of changing my passwords for all my services, but... I typoed the password for my main account, the victimized account. So I locked myself out of my own account while trying to protect it. Classic! But also scary. My recovery email was an old work email that was no longer in service so I couldn't receive the recovery code there. I tried other backup ways, but those didn't work either. The service provider said they couldn't prove that this is my account. I guess I can see that in some ways; they'd don't normally see my activity coming from Europe. Specifically, it shows up as "unknown location" in the app, so maybe I'm glad they are skeptical.

So I finally decided to ask my previous employer to temporarily enable my old email so I could recover my account. They graciously complied, and late last night I had a very cheerful and helpful phone call from the office. Staff stayed on the line with me and assisted with the password reset, they made sure I could log in, and set up my mail client.  Awesome, right? I immediately changed my recovery email away from the old work email, feeling like a real dumpkoff. After all, one of my previous tasks was to help customers avoid similar situations. That is how I knew all of the wrong things to do, and did them so well.

A great big giant Thank You to the team at the office who made this happen. You know who you are, and the others at the office can probably guess.  (I'm not naming names because I didn't ask for releases. I'm so sensitive!)