Merge failed with old account

Now that I have dug a little deeper I actually see 2 deactivated accounts for andrew.46, one from 2006 and one from 2011. The 2011 account went as far in the merge but sent an email to a long dead email account. These 2 accounts:

1. https://launchpad.net/~andrew.46-deactivatedaccount
2. https://launchpad.net/~andrew.46-deactivatedaccount1

I am currently investigating this and will post an update soon.

Thanks for your trouble..

Hi Andrew,

Can you tell us why you deactivated 2 of your previous Launchpad accounts and why you are now trying to merge your current account with one or both of those?

Since the registered email addresses for both those deactivated accounts are different from that of your current account, we will need to verify your ownership of those accounts and the associated email addresses before we can do the merge for you.

I see that you have added one OpenPGP key each to these deactivated accounts. If you can prove that you own those keys by replying to an encrypted (using each of those public keys) message, we can then proceed with the merge.

Hi Guruprasad,

Thanks for getting back to me again. I will answer your questions below:

---
Can you tell us why you deactivated 2 of your previous Launchpad accounts and why you are now trying to merge your current account with one or both of those?-
---
It is a long time ago but I have memories of deactivating these accounts in 2006 and 2011 when I left the Ubuntu family behind me. I think the earlier one was when some changes were made at the Ubuntu Forums that angered me and the 2011 one was when thought I had left Ubuntu for all time and gone to Slackware.

I want to merge these old accounts as I have been back with Ubuntu for some time with a strong presence in Ask Ubuntu where I have been elected as Moderator as month ago. I wish to also restart work I began many years ago with ubuntu-doc team and work on the wiki. The election:

https://meta.askubuntu.com/q/19974/57576

So I want to draw all of these old accounts back to me as a solid basis for moving forward as an Ubuntu team member (with a strong foot in the Slackware camp as well!)

---
Since the registered email addresses for both those deactivated accounts are different from that of your current account, we will need to verify your ownership of those accounts and the associated email addresses before we can do the merge for you.
----

The one email address I saw was <email address hidden> but I don't know if that is true of both old accounts. I still own andrews-corner.org and still run a web site there:

https://www.andrews-corner.org/

So is proof of ownership of the domain name enough? If necessary I can recreate any email address that end with @andrews-corner.org and perhaps this might be the way to go. Edit: I have now done this and I can see the merge message for 'andrew.46-deactivatedaccount1'. I have held off from this just while we are sorting things here.

---
I see that you have added one OpenPGP key each to these deactivated accounts. If you can prove that you own those keys by replying to an encrypted (using each of those public keys) message, we can then proceed with the merge.
---

My use of OpenPGP only ever went as far as signing up for the Ubuntu Code of Conduct so I suspect that I would fail that test very badly unfortunately. Hopefully there is another way, and perhaps recreating the email addresses themselves might be enough?

Thanks again for your trouble,

Andrew Strong

I have successfully merged the 2011 Launchpad account by recreating the <email address hidden> address so that one is happily merged.

 I am stuck still with the earliest account which has sent email for merge to:

<email address hidden>

and I have no control over that email address unfortunately. I believe that Gmail discards unused email addresses and so I suspect this address is lost and gone. Can you help out with this one?

Andrew

We are still looking into how we can verify your ownership of the second account and will post an update soon.

Thank you Guruprasad...

Andrew, unless you can prove your ownership of the email address associated with the second account or anything secret attached to the account, we cannot give you that account. Sorry!

Hi Guruprasad,

I have started a process with Google to reclaim andrew.david.52 but my expectation is that will not do well as Google has a pretty solid policy of not re-using or re-issuing email addresses.

So the only 'secret' I have attached to this old account is the PGP key? I see you that previously you have mentioned the possibility of sending me an encrypted message using that public key, could you do that and I will see what I have on old backup.

Crossed fingers :)

Andrew

Andrew,

I have encrypted some secret for you, using these email addresses:

gpg: encrypted with 2048-bit RSA key, ID 8994ACBDBCAB62AB, created 2010-08-06
      "Andrew David Strong <email address hidden>"
gpg: encrypted with 2048-bit ELG key, ID 7D3FC0BBF644BC5B, created 2008-11-24
      "Andrew Strong <email address hidden>"

Good luck decrypting! :-)

-----BEGIN PGP MESSAGE-----

hQGMAxeAsKhdtzjTAQwApizZt7hFgxdP/cTirvUK3F3PKa6HOIYerx2OiWgANrCz
FKM70rHKeR8t5iFJHlzarseYtuwp5Iixnd61i/+l8B0UsxY0N1VEOLfuYfEQQTRO
uFp47Pg9xfb11mNXziOfhNCf1I7PQF7cFu+9LLevsN4PGiE1iwPVZ552ZrJtdNae
eRufUtOybSOgksY0w/q/txcwaNTiwbPxtqEhukDOo4LKdw6De+8E9l6FYOpWMXqD
NoG1UdvideDmqm/PEgucDMqK0WLqEJfVRy+Yf3uOTOEbCJiwt8+vPW++3vA3KPev
/q8LNnnXtxrfWJE05uRveHQp4LMYMKaT+GgG6IcSyeoP53Jq3u8bgzGeJbH6CxGh
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eHtEfRisamZ9A15BmKFfGQ70s1M8f/+l4gBydut/egbmJOj7qUoXL4q5VIeRy8Wi
l8m4MIy1AN/WP9NuO36D6tXLXzF9s975I4bzlNEI6jCp
=bvih
-----END PGP MESSAGE-----

Internal reference (with the secret)
https://warthogs.atlassian.net/browse/LP-740

Sigh... cannot decrypt the message. So it looks like:

 1. I cannot access the old email addresses as Google has disposed of them after they were shut down by myself.
 2. I cannot decrypt messages sent to me as I no longer have access to the key.

All the remains is for me to say that this old account is definitely mine and all I have by the look of it is my word that this is the case. If this is not enough then I am resigned to losing the old account and moving on.

Andrew

Hi Andrew,

For the reasons mentioned already, we will be unable to give you the control of the Launchpad account in question unless we can verify that you owned those. Sorry!