Kafka's Space

A few people have left me private messages recently asking for help with Windows Live.  I'm happy to respond and see if there is anything I can do to help out.  However, when your account is set to not allow private messages in return and you don't leave an e-mail address, I have no way to reply to you.  So if you don't hear back from me, it's because I have no way to contact you.

When I recently was purchasing something from buy.com, I was tempted by the offer to save $50 if I signed up for the revolutioncard.  I figured I could save some money, then cancel the card after using it just for this one purchase.  Signing up for the card was simple and my purchase went through without a hitch.  Then I decided to log into my account, and that's when things got scary.

I created a strong password for my account, then tried to login.  I got an error message stating that only alphanumeric characters are allowed. I'm not allowed to have a strong password for my credit card account?  Actually, you are allowed to have a strong password, you just can't use it to log in. So I figured I'd reset my password, live with a not great password until I payed my balance and then cancel the card.  It turns out that their password "reset" simply e-mails you your current password.  This means that 1. they are storing my password unencrypted and anyone who has access to their database can read it  2. they are sending my password out  in  e-mail, where anyone can sniff it and 3. I still can't log in because my password contains characters they won't let me use when I login.  WTF!

I called customer support and waited for 45 minutes to talk to someone.  They obviously had gotten lots of calls about this since the woman who helped me knew exactly what had happened.  She said she wished they would change the sign in pages so I couldn't put "special" characters in in the first place.  She then told me it would take about 3 days for them to reset my password and that when they were done I should just log in with my original password, minus any special characters.  Yup, that's right, they had someone go in by hand and edit my password, removing the offending characters. As soon as I pay off my balance (by mail) I will be canceling this card.

My street sign, Harpster,  has been missing for many many months.  A couple weeks ago the city finally replaced it, and I guess they decided to take part in talk like a pirate day.

 

The latest version of Windows Live Hotmail is rolling out over the next few weeks, you can see the team blog for all the details. Here's a little more information on one of the features I've been working on, cleaning up duplicate contacts from you address book.

On the options page, there is a link for "Clean up duplicate contacts." This will walk you through all the duplicates we can identify and let you merge them as you see fit.  There's even an option to automatically merge all identical contacts to save you time. 

 

In addition, on the contacts page you can select entries by hand and click the "merge" button on the toolbar. This allows you to quickly combine multiple contacts without having to copy and paste information between browser windows.

And finally, after cleaning up your address book it would be a shame to let duplicates back in, wouldn't it?  When you click "add contact" while reading or after sending a message, WL Hotmail will notify you if someone by that name already exists in your address book and let you merge the new e-mail address to that record.

There you have it.  Not the sexiest feature we've ever rolled out, but hopefully one that is very useful.