Wednesday 22 July 2020

Gas Bill

My gas/electricity supplier is incompetent. The wrote to me asking for my meter readings, and as usual I emailed them straight back. They use their general customer services email address for meter readings, but they have a robot that reads the emails and extracts the meter readings. As normal I got back an email with the data that they had extracted, and a URL to visit to indicate that I was happy to proceed with those readings. The URL didn't work. In fact there was no page on the end of it. I did notice that they seem to be in the process of migrating to a different domain so I emailed them to tell them that their online service for confirming meter readings was broken.

Of course my email contained the trigger words "meter" and "reading" so the robot replied thanking me for my meter readings.

After several attempts I managed to send an email to their customer services to report a problem with their "m3t3r r34d1ng" service without triggering the robot to think that I was supplying meter readings.

While I was having this boring conversation with the robot, I was also trying to find a URL that would confirm my meter readings. I did have the GUID and a couple of other URL components to work with, and I know their old and their new domain. I didn't get it to work, but what I found out was horrifying. It's a Wordpress site, and there's a missing include in the user authentication section.

Richard "time to switch" B

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