aaaand it's down again

i saw this at work, seems to be back now

But this SendGrid episode has just re-enforced my old man distrust of 2FA. Either you're ultimately relying on email (if SendGrid had unlocked the account, that's where we'd be) or risk losing access to the account, where we ended up.

2FA just becomes something else to manage very very carefully.

Paying and updating the apikey is the trivial part of this exercise.

As a side note, when I signed up to SendGrid for the new account they gave me a 2FA recovery code, which I've now saved in the company business recovery area.

So my fear and doubt about 2FA have come about. The only thing we can do is create a new account with SendGrid. But that's not trivial, we have dozens of identities to setup, DNS to reconfigure (which needs to be done by our IT supplier, and can't be done until next week).

So here we are, unable to prove to SendGrid that we actually own this account. And they refuse to unlock 2FA for us.

On the one hand, I definitely applaud them. They shouldn't unlock it. We can't prove who we are. But, we do have the apikey, we just can't use it, we do have access to the email.

Ok so no worries, says SendGrid support, just send us an email using your api key with this special code in it and we'll unlock the account for you.

But the problem is: the reason we're looking at this at all is because we can't send email. There's no special carve out for this particular email.

But we still don't have access to the phone, so that doesn't work.

So the next step is to contact support. They ask for any payment information they can verify. But we were using the free plan, there were no bills or invoices or credit cards that we could point to.

"Your password is protected with two-factor authentication. Please enter the code from your authenticator app."

No one has the authenticator app, it was on the previous guy's personal phone. As far as we're concerned, that no longer exists.

But look, we can: "Request code via text message instead"

The first step was to work out the account login, but after a little trial and error we discovered it was a generic company email, so no worries there. I have access to the old account too, so even if it was there, a password reset would have been no issue.

But then:

Of course, I'm new, and of course there was a system that no one else realised used SendGrid. It wasn't a system I'd seen, so when the account stopped working, it stopped this part of the system working as well.

Good, let's setup payments. Paying for something we actually use isn't a problem.

Anyway, we had been using the free tier for SendGrid. They decided to remove this, and honestly fine. I only knew of one use of SendGrid, to send error notifications from the data ingest system. It wasn't that useful, so we decided to just remove it and let it lapse.

I've recently joined a company that uses SendGrid to send emails. We're in the strange and unusual position of the previous "tech who knew everything" having died unexpectedly a few months before. It's incredibly sad, but when we talk about the "truck count" for your company: it happens.