Despite my sadness at the stagnation of Flickr, I still use it regularly to upload, share and store images. Or at least I used to.
I can still upload everything perfectly from my mobile, but whenever I try and sign in to my account on my laptop, I’m asked for a confirmation code, which is emailed to my Gmail account.
Only the code never arrives. I’ve checked my Inbox, Spam Folder, All Mail and Trash. I’ve run out of retries, and I can’t sign into Yahoo Mail either, so I’ve completely stuck.
I know it’s the right address because I still have emails informing me that my subscription to Flickr Pro has expired, for example. And the email asking me to confirm my new email address back in 2009.
I’ve checked Settings and Filters, and there’s nothing there to hid or block the email.
So there are two options:
1. Gmail is mysteriously blocking some emails – I’ve had this happen to another Gmail address earlier this week when repeated invites to a Slack team didn’t show up. But this was an account with a domain alias, so I’m not ruling out user error. Whereas Yahoo have an email address for me with no aliases etc to confuse things.
2. Yahoo is not sending emails – I don’t know how likely this is, but why is there no possible way to access my account/verification code besides the one email address, and no easy way to contact support? If they knew they were going to be increasing Yahoo ID security, why not prompt existing users to add their mobile number beforehand, for example?
It’s just generally crap, and has made me keener than ever to invest in a new external hard drive for photos, and to sign up to 500px as a paying user for a service which might actually work.
It definitely doesn’t give me any faith in future Yahoo products.
(Disclosure: I know 1 or 2 people who work at Yahoo on the Editorial side of things. I haven’t asked if they’ve hidden my security code behind the sofa)
*edit* It was only as I pressed publish my brain finally made the connection that both Flickr and Slack were co-founded by the same person – Stewart Butterfield. Strange coincidence….
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