I’ll start this post with saying, I am actually a huge fan of TWITTER, but I am not a fan of Twitter’s password recovery process.
In simple terms, if you have lost your password and cannot access your email address there is NO OTHER OPTION to gain access to your account.
It does not matter what you say to TWITTER, they only have ONE password recovery option, and that is the email address that the Twitter account was registered with. Even if the email address is wrong, old, no longer used, it is the single option that Twitter makes available.
TWITTER says… Unfortunately, if you don’t have access to the account’s email address or verified mobile number, we are unable to continue troubleshooting. While we understand that it can be disappointing when you lose access to an account, we use these verification requirements to make sure we don’t give out any user information to the wrong person.
Twitter talks about a verified phone number, but with the 10 twitter accounts we manage, not once have we ever verified a phone number, so its either a new innovation or one that is hidden away from the normal registration process.
What makes our situation even harder to fathom, we still can still TWEET on the account we are trying to get the password for.
On one of our old computers, we have TWEETDECK installed and it has the account (and password) registered and working. If TWITTER were flexible, we could show them that we can tweet a secret that only TWITTER and us know about, but no, they don’t do that. Our twitter account has other information associated with it, such as our web site address so we could upload a file to that domain, but no, they don’t do that either.
TWITTER tells us its registered with a gmail address, but using the recovery feature, no Twitter confirmation email ever arrives (and yes, we have checked spam) so one can only assume its going to an address that was incorrectly typed.
I don’t know about you, but it seems ridiculous to me that the only method of recovering a password, is by email. I would be happy to pay for TWITTER’s time to assist in me proving its my account, but all there correspondence amounts to.. only email. Oh, they did say once to allow the twitter account to expire (by not posting to it) and then recover the account as a new account. In other words, lose our 1,512 followers and history.
twitter.com/onlysydney
This is the account in question… onlysydney.
https://twitter.com/OnlySydney
Now, we are not trying to annoy TWITTER, we are simply trying to suggest, there must be another way…
Resources
- Support @ Twitter – if you know the email address
- Resend your password – if you know your email or phone number
- Contact Twitter –
- Twitter Password Decryptor – recovery tool via your web browser
After Hacking Scandal – April 2013
Twitter has been criticized for failing to deploy two-step (or two-factor) authentication, which would make it harder for hackers to gain access to an account. Providers such as Google, Microsoft, and Facebook already offer this. Wired reported Tuesday that Twitter is now testing a two-step process with hopes of releasing it incrementally to users.
Source: cpj.org