CitizenTax: Epic Failure

Mar 4, 11:26 AM by Eric Allen

I really should have Done my homework before picking a free tax preparation service through the IRS’s Free File site. After my ordeal with CitizenTax (or CitizenTaxFree.com, the version I used from the same people), $75 to a tax preparer seemed like no big deal.

I should have run at the first sight of trouble: every now and then as I walked through the process their site would return an error page. A simple refresh fixed it, usually, but that is a little worrisome for a site that’s supposed to be processing my taxes. I went ahead anyway, and after submitting my taxes (I must admit, the site was pretty easy to use) logged out and went on to do other things.

I came back the next day to check on the status of my return, and lo and behold I can’t log in! I double-check, triple-check my username and password with no success. I then sought out their support page, and after 10 minutes of digging got myself registered (yes, yet another account) with their issue tracking system. I filed a ticket, and the following day I got a completely unhelpful reply saying to enter my username and password to log in. I carefully explained that I was unable to log in with said username and password. After a good deal more back-and-forth, I came to discover a fun feature of their password hashing algorithm: they don’t support symbols in passwords. I had naïvely used my secure password generator (1Password) to generate a good password, and it had put in symbols! CitizenTax informed me that my account was impossible to access, they couldn’t reset my password, and I should just sign up again and restart my return. But I had already filed it!! I just wanted to check the status to make sure the IRS had accepted it. After calling the IRS I discovered that I was supposed to receive an email confirmation from them, which I never got, saying the IRS had processed my return. The only way I know it went through is that they took the money out of my checking account four days later!

Just to add to the ordeal, CitizenTax doesn’t inform you about standard deductions, so I ended up paying $400 too much. This I discovered from the CPA (who will be filing my taxes next year) I got to clean up the mess CitizenTax left.

Good job, CitizenTax. Way to handle people’s tax records in a completely incompetent and unfriendly way. Next time I’ll be more careful!

TipJoy Textpattern plugin

Feb 13, 01:08 PM by Eric Allen

Yesterday I quickly hacked TipJoy buttons into the articles on my site, but my solution was not very elegant or flexible. I have now gone back and put that code into a Textpattern plugin that can be downloaded here. All you have to do is install it like any other Textpattern plugin, and then drop a <txp:tj_button /> or <txp:tj_banner /> tag where you want them to show up.

Recover deleted messages in Mail.app

Mar 10, 05:13 PM by Eric Allen

I accidentally selected all of the messages in my archive folder in Mail.app today and hit delete. I was trying to delete everything in my inbox, but missed. I’ve got it set up to not use a trash, so the messages just disappeared. However, upon further inspection they were still sitting on my hard drive. One hint I found while Googling gave me an idea. If the messages are still there (instead of in a backup as in that case), all I have to do is delete the Envelope Index file and they should all come back! Sure enough, after navigating to ~/Library/Mail and deleting the 13MB Envelope Index file, Mail started up and decided it needed to index all of my mail again. However, I ended up in the same predicament, with all of my messages indexed but not visible. So, with a little more digging I discovered that each emlx file has some flags embedded in it, including one for deletion. No problem, I just whipped up a Ruby script to go through an emlx file, search for the flags, and undelete it. It took about five minutes to go though all of my mail, but it worked.

Procedure

  1. Close Mail.app
  2. Make a backup of ~/Library/Mail (just in case)
  3. Delete ~/Library/Mail/Envelope Index
  4. download my ruby script
  5. navigate to the Messages directory of the mail folder you want to recover in Terminal (e.g. ~/Library/Mail/Mailboxes/Archive.mbox/Messages)
  6. run the following commands in terminal
    1. mkdir temp
    2. for i in `ls *.emlx`; do ruby [path to ruby script] < $i > temp/$i;done
    3. rm *.emlx
    4. mv temp/* .
  7. open Mail.app
  8. Go to the Mailbox menu and select “Rebuild” at the bottom
  9. see your mail magically appear!

Email me if you need any help with this since I have failed to make it robust or include the actual shell commands.

Update: I just did this to my sent folder again and the process worked beautifully.