Laurabelle's Blog

You know, the reason AOL customers have such a bad reputation among geeks is that some of them do things like this:

From: AOL user
Date: Thu, 15 Sep 2005 10:59:31 EDT
Subject: Please help asap
To: debian-user

My name is adele [lastname]..my e-mail address is [address deleted]..this morning..i
tried to change my email password..

i went to keyword..then change password..my old password was...[password#1]..i
changed it to [password#2] ...but when i went to change it again..to [password#3]..
it said [password#2] was not the right password..now i am stuck..and am afraid to
turn aol off..because i don't have a way of getting back to my mail...PLEASE HELP
ME>>> my phone number is 1-xxx-xxx-xxxx..cell is 1-xxx-xxx-xxxx

please call me..please..thank you..

adele

I have every sympathy with her wanting help with her password (hey, I have trouble using AOL's software too), but why in the world does she think debian-user is the place for help? And just about the first thing to know about security is that you never, ever put your password in email, much less in an email to a public mailing list that is archived on the Web.

Unfortunately this is a fairly regular occurrence. Every so often, some clueless AOL user will post about some AOL-specific problem. I honestly don't understand where they find debian-user (a Web search engine?) and why they expect to find help there. Debian-user is a mailing list for users of the Debian Linux operating system. Debian is considered pretty hard-core, and people on that mailing list tend not to have a high opinion of Windows or Windows-only software (although a number of members are sysadmins of Windows boxes as well). I have a hard time thinking of a worse place to ask for help with AOL.

I'm going to have pity on this poor woman. I'll email her and tell her to call AOL support as fast as she possibly can, so that they can reset her password. I hope nobody's cracked her account already; she might have mistyped the second password when she tried to change it to password #3, but maybe not. In any case, it wouldn't take too many tries with a password-guessing program to find the right password.