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I recently received emails from Powtoon, a business in the UK that is exceptionally awful. Someone created an account using my email address and Powtoon allowed it. *sigh* Whatever, I dug around in their support and asked them to remove my email.
They sent me email — and I want to be clear, I got email from them. They said, no worries, just reply to this so we know it’s really you. I did. And yet, they then asked, no, we want it from the email that was signed up, not this one. To be clear, _this is all in email, and they are sending _to_ the email address that was signed up.
FirstnameLastname@gmail.com
My gmail is of the form:
Firstname.Lastname@gmail.com
As everyone really should know by now — and yet clearly does not — dots to the left of the @ do not count. They are filtered out. However, I cannot create an email with a From of FirstnameLastname@gmail.com, well, not without engaging in a bunch of shenanigans which I don’t do. Anymore. I haven’t for decades.
I explored — briefly — whether I could do something in gmail to change my from to one of the variants, and nothing obvious is showing up. If you know if a way to do this, please let me know.
Powtoon is exceptional in that they _keep refusing to remove this email_, even tho _when they send email to this email they get me_. Every. Single. Time. It’s weird. I don’t know what they think is going on. I sent them the gmail support article about the dots and so forth.
They are not alone in being confused. In my ongoing project to shift things from my old email at a local-to-Seattle ISP to the gmail account (which I’ve had since gmail was in beta), I have encountered companies which will literally let you sign in with google authentication if someone signed up with your gmail address. This is different from, they let someone sign up with your email and you roundtrip the password reset link. No, this is, just click the “log in with google” button and boom presto you are into someone else’s account with someone else’s physical address and past order history. The first time that happened, I felt mildly guilty. Since then, I’ve just thought, well, _that_ made it simple and took the account over as long as there was no cell phone connected to it and there was zero or one orders and they were at least a couple years in the past. When there is a cell phone connected to it, I just change the email to something nonsensical and move on. They can keep their account; they just can’t keep my email attached to it.
It isn’t _wrong_ as a company to let someone sign in using google authentication if they have an account with a google email address. It’s _wrong_ to let someone sign in using Not Their Own Address. But Powtoon has really taken it to a new level. I told them I’m documenting everything I receive for them and will be pursuing compensation under CAN-SPAM. Maybe that will shake lose someone sensible over there.
ETA: I’m also looking into my options via the ICO. Because honestly, it tends to be British companies that are _this_ obstreperously backwards.
https://ico.org.uk/make-a-complaint/data-protection-complaints/data-protection-complaints/
The reality, of course, is that customer service over at Powtoon is going to escalate my comment about pursuing compensation under CAN-SPAM just to try to figure out what is going on and that should result in someone carefully reading the google gmail article about dots and they’ll apologize and fix it. But if not, I might as well learn a few things, and I learn best by doing.
ETA: OK, revised opinion. These people have turned off the review feature on FB, and review aggregators have really bad reviews of them. I don’t think I’m going to get them to turn this stuff off. Looks like I’ll be learning things.
ETA still more: someone escalated so my latest email from Powtoon had a much more conciliatory tone. Still justifying what they did, but also saying they’d deleted the account. Dude, I don’t care about the account. It’s not my account. I just fucking wanted my email out of your system. But I suspect they can’t have an account without an email attached to it, so everyone was stuck. _Which is why you should not let accounts form without a validated email._
I will endeavor to remember the CAN-SPAM threat and the ICO followup as well. I used them mostly because telling the repeat exit scam phone caller that I was going to report them to the Massachusetts attorney general was so ludicrously effective. I may blog a bit more about negotiating tactics, and the specific error these people — and a bunch of others — are making.
Still don’t do business with Powtoon. I wouldn’t want to have a credit card number entangled in their system. Goddess knows what would happen.
They sent me email — and I want to be clear, I got email from them. They said, no worries, just reply to this so we know it’s really you. I did. And yet, they then asked, no, we want it from the email that was signed up, not this one. To be clear, _this is all in email, and they are sending _to_ the email address that was signed up.
FirstnameLastname@gmail.com
My gmail is of the form:
Firstname.Lastname@gmail.com
As everyone really should know by now — and yet clearly does not — dots to the left of the @ do not count. They are filtered out. However, I cannot create an email with a From of FirstnameLastname@gmail.com, well, not without engaging in a bunch of shenanigans which I don’t do. Anymore. I haven’t for decades.
I explored — briefly — whether I could do something in gmail to change my from to one of the variants, and nothing obvious is showing up. If you know if a way to do this, please let me know.
Powtoon is exceptional in that they _keep refusing to remove this email_, even tho _when they send email to this email they get me_. Every. Single. Time. It’s weird. I don’t know what they think is going on. I sent them the gmail support article about the dots and so forth.
They are not alone in being confused. In my ongoing project to shift things from my old email at a local-to-Seattle ISP to the gmail account (which I’ve had since gmail was in beta), I have encountered companies which will literally let you sign in with google authentication if someone signed up with your gmail address. This is different from, they let someone sign up with your email and you roundtrip the password reset link. No, this is, just click the “log in with google” button and boom presto you are into someone else’s account with someone else’s physical address and past order history. The first time that happened, I felt mildly guilty. Since then, I’ve just thought, well, _that_ made it simple and took the account over as long as there was no cell phone connected to it and there was zero or one orders and they were at least a couple years in the past. When there is a cell phone connected to it, I just change the email to something nonsensical and move on. They can keep their account; they just can’t keep my email attached to it.
It isn’t _wrong_ as a company to let someone sign in using google authentication if they have an account with a google email address. It’s _wrong_ to let someone sign in using Not Their Own Address. But Powtoon has really taken it to a new level. I told them I’m documenting everything I receive for them and will be pursuing compensation under CAN-SPAM. Maybe that will shake lose someone sensible over there.
ETA: I’m also looking into my options via the ICO. Because honestly, it tends to be British companies that are _this_ obstreperously backwards.
https://ico.org.uk/make-a-complaint/data-protection-complaints/data-protection-complaints/
The reality, of course, is that customer service over at Powtoon is going to escalate my comment about pursuing compensation under CAN-SPAM just to try to figure out what is going on and that should result in someone carefully reading the google gmail article about dots and they’ll apologize and fix it. But if not, I might as well learn a few things, and I learn best by doing.
ETA: OK, revised opinion. These people have turned off the review feature on FB, and review aggregators have really bad reviews of them. I don’t think I’m going to get them to turn this stuff off. Looks like I’ll be learning things.
ETA still more: someone escalated so my latest email from Powtoon had a much more conciliatory tone. Still justifying what they did, but also saying they’d deleted the account. Dude, I don’t care about the account. It’s not my account. I just fucking wanted my email out of your system. But I suspect they can’t have an account without an email attached to it, so everyone was stuck. _Which is why you should not let accounts form without a validated email._
I will endeavor to remember the CAN-SPAM threat and the ICO followup as well. I used them mostly because telling the repeat exit scam phone caller that I was going to report them to the Massachusetts attorney general was so ludicrously effective. I may blog a bit more about negotiating tactics, and the specific error these people — and a bunch of others — are making.
Still don’t do business with Powtoon. I wouldn’t want to have a credit card number entangled in their system. Goddess knows what would happen.