Email Address Change
Regular readers may have noticed that the block of text at the top of the right column of the template of this blog has disappeared. It contained the Expansionist Party's email address at America Online. Unfortunately, that account was hacked a couple of months ago. Whoever did it locked me out, and AOL's insane procedures kept me from recapturing an email account I had had since perhaps 1993. Someone dared to change my mother's maiden name in AOL's records, and AOL didn't find that suspicious. The info AOL required me to provide either to recapture or to close down that screenname — which info might also have been changed by whoever stole that account (e.g., the number of the credit or debit card I last used to pay for service) was so old that I would have no record of it. I dropped my paid service years ago, and credit and debit card numbers change over the years, even with the same account.
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The woman on the fone asked about my home address, and I provided my current address and the last two before that, but that info did not match their records — or they did not actually HAVE any such records. Perhaps this was an inside job within AOL's current employees, or by a former employee who knew how to alter information at AOL.
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That AOL supervisor wouldn't say whether they did or did not actually have home-address info, even tho she asked for it. But how could they have such info but it didn't match what I told her by fone? I have had only 3 addresses in 37 years! But that woman said their records did not reflect any of those addresses. So I could not recapture that account.
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Nor could I figure out where the block of text atop this blog's template was stored, to change the email address there. That text did not appear in the template's HTML code, and it took a while for me to figure out how to delete that block (thanks to some research by XP's British coordinator, Jeremy P., which pointed me in the right direction). So I have been able to delete that old email address from this blog. I also deleted it from XP's small, interim website on Tripod.com (the webhost for our domain-name website, which was very big, malfunctioned, and I could not update anything, so I had to abandon that site too! — the Internet is such a MESS nowadays). But the old email address is still getting messages. I can see the number increment in the list of my AOL screennames, even tho I cannot log onto that screenname. I hope, but do not know for sure, that no one is carrying on email correspondence, pretending to be the Expansionist Party, and misrepresenting our stances, soliciting contributions, etc. The new, incoming emails I cannot see may all be spam, for all I know. At least I hope so.
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A Google Blogger support page gives info about how to put manual text into the template, but I have not had time to read and try out those instructions, and cannot say when I will be able either to put in manual text or figure out where Blogger was pulling the text that was atop the right column from, and revise it there, to be pulled up automatically in a revised template.
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In any case, if you would like to communicate with the Expansionist Party, please do so via the email address USExpansionists @ gmail . com . And if you have received suspicious email from XPUS @ aol . com within the past few months, disbelieve it — and forward it to me so I can know what is being said thru the hijacked email account I can neither access nor delete.
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 11:58 PM