Unrequested Account Recovery Email Message

People with multiple identities have been objects of interest for many years.

Occasionally, we see activity by the less public faces. Sometimes, odd behaviour by Blogger will make you think that you have a second personality - one that you (your more public face, you hope), of course, aren't aware.

Occasionally, you may get an intriguing bit of email from Blogger Support.

This email is a response to your request for information about the Blogger account with the username xxxxxxx.

This account has been associated with the Google Account [email address]. You must use this email address to log in to Blogger from now on.

If you have forgotten the password to this Google Account, visit the following URL to reset it.

http://www.blogger.com/forgot.g

This account is a member of the following blogs:

Here you should see a list of your blogs.

If you experience any problems or have further questions, please visit our help site at http://help.blogger.com/

Sincerely,
The Blogger Team

This does sound ominous, you didn't request a password reset!

This is a little scary, because you know what your account, and you password is, so why would you have requested this information? Is Blogger Support harassing you?
Cue spooky music.

Or worse yet, is somebody trying to break into your account? OMG, I'm being hacked.
Cue scary music.

Calm down, you're not being hacked!!

Reality, though, is a bit less exciting. Blogger Support has repeatedly said that they will keep your Blogger account for you, forever, and that they will never disclose your account information to anybody.

That being the case, what happens if, one day, you forget your account information? Hoping that you still have access to the email account that you used, when you registered your account, you use the Google Account Recovery tool, and plug in what you think is your account name (email address).

Hopefully, Blogger will helpfully send an email to the address associated with the account. If the account is yours, and the email address is yours, you'll get the email. If the account isn't yours, somebody else gets the email.

If you got the email, the other person didn't - and they don't find out about you.

If you just got the email, and you didn't request the information, then it's likely that somebody else was trying to guess their own account name - and entered your account name, instead.

Your account is safe.

Since you got the email, the other person didn't - and you and your account are still secret to you. You are safe, your account is safe, the other person didn't get any information about you.

The other person doesn't care about you, or your account - they only want access to their own blog. Here's hoping that one of their other tries got the email to them.

Discard your copy of their email message, and work on your blog. Stop the music.

But, there's more to this story!

You just got an email, mentioning somebody else's account. This scenario has been the start of some real life blog thefts.

Blogger wants to protect your account from theft - and they also want to protect the other person's from theft.

So, when you (or the other person) tries to use "Forgot?" to recover access, they verify account access demographics. Suspicious account recovery / possible hacking attempts lead to additional identification questions.

They demand my birthdate / when did I last access Blogger / what other Google accounts do I have! Why am I treated like a criminal, just for recovering my password??!!