Further to my previous post, Don’t Hit F5, also in response to a comment by Steve, and to fulfill a promise to Mandy… Get This!

Useful tip for submitting forms on websites and, if you didn’t read “F5” already, I suggest you go there now. It’s a short read and this is along the same lines.

The title of this post was earmarked as “Technophobic relapse” but, in view of Steve just challenging me (in a way), that title shall wait for the next occasion when I have a “senior moment”.

It happens, folks, and it ain’t no fun… either the “senior moment” or the consequences of same. Although… I tend to just laugh. I mean… what else is there to do?

OK, here goes… there was a need for me to add a service in a business of which I’ve been a member for years, also to use a secondary eMail address.
So I filled out the form and submitted it.

All goes well, so far… and it wasn’t just a case of giving the new eMail. There was a form and some text to go with it. Because they already had my primary eMail address, I gave them my Yahoo! Wrong move!

Having great trust in my company, their technology, and their ultra-safe eMail system, I had no reason to make a copy of my submission.
Or so I thought!
Yahoo, in their wisdom, and in the interests of my great care and safety, didn’t even sift the validation request to the Trash folder.

That bit of protection was something I could have done without. I had to go back to my company, write up the message from memory, fill in the form again, and then hit Submit.

Folks… I wanna tell yuh… if you haven’t already done so, and you need a secondary eMail account… Please do yourself a favour and visit the Big G. Google at least have the grace of giving you the option to decide whether or not your own damn eMail receipts are valid, junk, spam or not.

This little whoopsie was not my fault, other than trusting Yahoo.

The validation came through instantly to my GoogleMail, as you would expect, and it did go in the unknown sender folder. Subsequent eMails from the same source (and various departments) have all gone in as recognised and safe since being whitelisted. Big bully for Google there.

Incidentally, when you have a Google eMail account, you automatically have two eMail addresses; YourID@googlemail.com - and YourID@gmail. com

How neat’s that? Good, eh?

Big Tip is this… the above case was more frustrating than hard work or mental gymnastics. The amount of actual text was not as much as the form filling, so it would not be much help, or very easy, to make a text file copy for the details required in the form fields.

Sure, it could be done, or Roboform would have much of the detail required for a standard form, but it still wouldn’t get the darn vaildation eMail through, would it? And that was the problem in this case.

However, when you need to submit a form in a website, and unless you can be sure to fill it in quickly, write it up in Notepad first, as a plain text file. That way, if there should be a technical glitch, or the website does a timeout on you, you won’t have to write the damn lot up again.

Summary:-

1. Yahoo are becoming as bad as AOL for trashing your eMails.
2. Go to Google and get a GMail account.
3. Write your Form submissions in Notepad in case of gremlins.

In case you hadn’t realised it yet… I’m having a great time writing this Blog.
And I mean that most sincerely, folks, I really do.
Anybody remember Hughie Green?

Good Morning. Time now 06.26.
I might as well stay up now, dontcha think?

Ken