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

Fri Sep 26 15:59:49 UTC 2025

Totally agree, Carl. 

As if we all don’t have enough “urgent” messages in our inboxes.

Best regards, 

John

John Pietrangelo

Registered Patent Agent

Tech Valley Patent, LLC

499 Glen Street

Glens Falls, NY 12801

888-669-5515

www.techvalleypatent.com

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From: Patentpractice <patentpractice-bounces at oppedahl-lists.com> on behalf of Carl Oppedahl via Patentpractice <patentpractice at oppedahl-lists.com>
Reply-To: "For patent practitioners. This is not for laypersons to seek legal advice." <patentpractice at oppedahl-lists.com>
Date: Thursday, September 25, 2025 at 12:21 PM
To: "practitioners.advice. For patent This is not for laypersons to seek legal" <patentpractice at oppedahl-lists.com>
Cc: Carl Oppedahl <carl at oppedahl.com>
Subject: [Patentpractice] USPTO doing it exactly wrong (was Re: Time to secure your USPTO account)

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:

November 1 deadline 

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