[Patentpractice] USPTO doing it exactly wrong (was Re: Time to secure your USPTO account)

Thu Sep 25 16:18:17 UTC 2025

If you want to get some fraction of a group to do something, the correct 
way to do it is to target that fraction.  The absolutely wrong way to do 
it is to carpet-bomb the entirety of the group, cluttering the in-boxes 
of the rest of the group.

I received this email today.  It hammers away at how I must have been 
using email as my two-factor authentication to log in at the USPTO, and 
that I need to set up and use some other form of two-factor authentication.

The problem with this is that /*I have never even once in my life used 
email as my two-factor authentication to log in at the USPTO. */Not even 
once.

There are, I expect, some people to whom the USPTO ought to have sent 
this scolding email.  Probably the way to pick a person to receive this 
email is to pick people who actually did use email as their two-factor 
authentication at least once since the first announcements that the 
USPTO made about this.  Meaning the fraction of USPTO customers that 
have, within the past few months, done this supposedly very bad thing 
(using email as their two-factor authentication).

And then perhaps a week or two later, sending followup emails to the 
smaller fraction of customers who used email again as their two-factor 
authentication despite having been scolded against it in the previous 
scolding email.

The practical result would be that with each succeeding followup, fewer 
and fewer scolding emails would need to be sent.

This targets the scolding at the people who need it (assuming the USPTO 
is correct in its view that email is bad as a way to do two-factor 
authentication).

But the absolute wrong thing to do is to scold the tens or likely 
hundreds of thousands of customers who don't need scolding at the 
present time.  A first example of people who don't need scolding at all 
is people like me who have never even once done the (supposedly) bad 
thing.  A second example of people who don't need scolding now is the 
tens or likely hundreds of thousands of customers /*who have already 
done*/ what the USPTO wanted them to do, namely have already migrated 
away from email and over to some other form of two-factor authentication.

It is like "the boy who cried wolf".  When the USPTO carpet-bombs its 
entire customer base like this, the USPTO virtually ensures that 
tomorrow or next week or next month, some urgent message will get 
disregarded by the customers given that so many previous supposedly 
urgent messages were inappropriate and were not urgent at all for the 
particular recipient.

On 9/25/2025 9:40 AM, U.S. Patent and Trademark Office wrote:
> Time to secure your USPTO account
> November 1 deadline
>
>
> 	
>
> Having trouble viewing this email? View it as a Web page 
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>
>
>   USPTO Alert
>
>
>     Strengthen your account security
>
> Effective *November 1*, you can no longer verify your identity using 
> email when you log into our systems, including Patent Center, 
> Trademark Center, and TEAS. Switch to a safer authentication method 
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