This one is going to be a brief post today, but I’m still hoping it might save someone out there some frustrations.

I have been working on an Azure database with a 3rd party and created some new users for them. We always, in the past that is, would send the user name via e-mail and password via text message. We’ve done so for a couple years now. So I did so and sent off the necessary credentials. A day or so later, they contacted me to validate because it wouldn’t work for them. So I logged on using SSMS without issue. They asked me to try the new Azure Query page and that worked fine for me as well.

At this point I decided to e-mail the password again to be sure they had copy/pasted it properly from the original text message and was informed “that wasn’t the password I had texted”. Of course it was, I stated with a supporting screenshot from my cell phone’s messaging app!

Well, as it turns out, we were both right and wrong at the same time?! I did indeed send the proper password, but somewhere during the transmission and reception going between network providers, android to apple device, and everything in between, some of the characters were converted/changed? In this specific instance, a ^ was changed to a [.

Needless to say a lot of time was wasted on something so mundane as an every day text message.

So moral of the story, don’t rely on text messaging!  I now provided a link to a secured text file in a separate e-mail.