Thank you Evernote!

The fantastic news in the saga of working to reclaim my wife's Evernote account has a very happy ending. In working with the Evernote support team (which is incredibly helpful) it appeared that the only option was to create a brand new Evernote account and then import the notes that were sync'd on her laptop. This was a less than ideal solution because it meant her old account would be orphaned and accessible to the person who owned the email address I mistakenly used when registering her account. Because of this I've been delaying setting up my wife's new Evernote account.

You can't imagine my happiness when I fired up Evernote on her laptop this morning and was directed to the web to reset her password. On the page where there used to be just a "An email has been sent" message, there was a "I didn't get the email" button. That took me through a new 'account recovery' flow that allowed me to reclaim my wife's original account (rather than create a new one). Basically, I had to enter the email address I had used to register the account as well as my wife's username and old password. From there I could reset the password. Now that I had reclaimed the account, I went in and fixed my email mistake so I won't get stuck in this situation again:)

THANK YOU EVERNOTE!!!

Another reason to get rid of passwords

This morning I had a very unpleasant experience regarding passwords. A couple years ago I set up an Evernote account for my wife (I had recently given her an iPad). With the recent evernote hack and exposure, I wanted to help her reset her password and get her iPad and laptop apps back in a working order. This should be a very simple and straight forward process... except for one minor problem that has effectively locked my wife out of her account.

The problem? I accidentally registered her account with the wrong email address. My wife uses an email provider that supports multiple email domains and without thinking I used the wrong domain. Now it appears that Evernote has chosen to only support resetting passwords via an email message and that, using an email address that was never verified. So my wife can ask for as many "reset emails" as she wants, but she will never receive them and Evernote does not appear to provide any other mechanism to reset a password.

While I'm very frustrated with my own mistake in setting up the account, I can't believe that Evernote would allow password reset flows with unverified email addresses.