Published on August 15, 2006
in General.
I lost my Skype account today thanks to their unbelievable password policy. When you click on their
Forgot your password? link, you get taken to a page that asks you for your user name and the email address that you *originally signed up with*. WTF? I don't even have that domain any more! Furthermore, Skype lets you change your email address in your profile but will not send your password to that email. It's as bad as banks here in the UK thinking that living at a single address for three years makes you more trustworthy or something (it's because we don't have a real credit rating system here.) In any case, I've got a new Skype account now so please ping me if you were on my list and I'll add you on again.
Skype: Big thumbs down!
[Update] One of my readers, Erki Esken, who works at Skype contacted me to help and was able to change the email address I originally signed up with so I could receive the forgotten password email. Thanks, Erki! 
And I hope that Skype will also review this workflow as I'm sure other people have found themselves in this situation.
The Skype’s ridiculous password policy article by Aral Balkan, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 2.0 UK: England License.
I have run into similar situations in the past when I registered something under my current employer’s domain. When I didn’t work there anymore and needed the password reset, guess where they sent the password? To the email address I no longer had access to, nor probably existed anymore.
Feel your pain, but its not just Skype. Shoot them an email about it - perhaps they will change how it works. Its an edge case, but I am sure it happens more frequently than Skype probably imagined.
the same thing happened to me… with my original 1994(?) AOL account. LOL. i still can’t get back my drwoohoo user name… even with friends on the inside. you’re lucky you have friends in high places.
woohoo!
drew
Lucky of yours that has a friend in there, you have to meet me with him to help in an old account too of skype, because I’ve lost the pass and could create a new one.
Me too! I wish Skype would change their password policy.
I had the same thing happen to me with Hotmail as well.
Is your bunny totally reliable ?
Are there similar, more professionla devices ? I am looking for a remote annunciator to alert people of events happening on a website., like when someone uses a reply box like this, it adds a record to a MySQL table, and every minute, a cron based job activates the annunciator if there are any alerts. Make poeple not have to be a slave to emails, or SMS messages - a visual (or audio) thing .
Thank you for any sugestions you might have.
Don Keller
New Orleans LA USA
drkeller {at} sstar(.)com
http://www.strongcontrols.com/
Hello mate…few days ago i tried to log in my skype and it said wrong password or nickaname…and i was like wtf i wrote a mail to skype support and they told me that i didnt purchase from them/my email is deleted like for 1 year/ and i cant retrive the password…can u ask ur friend from skype to help me with it?My skype nickname is serafim_alex /Megaraider….Now im trying to prove skype that im the real owner of the account…Can u ask ur friend to retrieve my password i ll do everything to prove that im the real owner of the account.Its not my fault that it was hacked/highjaked/….
-best wishes Meagaraider.
can you answer my ask? or not?
I lost my password to my Skype account “wkosin”, now I can’t use the passwordreminder page because I didn’t set up any e-mail. but this account is mine. My e-mail address is wkosin[at]yahoo.com
can you help me?