How to share a login that uses SMS for 2FA
How to share a login that uses SMS for 2FA
We are a group of hobbyists managing a mailing list. Mailchimp insists on SMS authentication to login now which has scuppered our plans to spread the workload.
Are there any free / cheap services that would receive a text messages and forward it by email to several people? If not, is there an alternative way to deal with this situation? We’re not necessarily attached to mail chimp but delivery is important.
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I think Mailchimp just expects each person to have their own account there, each with their own 2FA authentication. Guessing that's not quite the answer you want :)
Just took a look at my work's Mailchimp and we seem to have authenticator and SMS authentication available. Can't you just set yours to authenticator and share the code amongst yourselves? That seems easiest in your situation unless you also ruled that out.
My Mailchimp account also has email authentication but that may be because it's an older account, I don't see it as an option when I look in the Security options right now. But it's worth checking if yours has that as an option, then just set that email to a shared email and/or auto forward that incoming email to others.
Or worst case - Not sure if feasible but maybe a shared google voice account? Services like Google voice can do sms to email so all the incoming texts can come into the email and then you can auto forward or do whatever from there.
I haven’t used an authenticator so this might be a basic question, but: when you say to share the code, do you mean each time we need to authenticate? Most of us keep our phones on silent so we mightn’t be good candidates for that.
Thank for the helpful reply. I don’t have the email option but as a last resort I could explore Google Voice options in the EU.
It's basically what others mentioned - the code can be a long string you can enter, but usually it's a QR image representing the code itself (I'm sure Mailchimp is going to give you a QR image when you set it up).
Most people use a TOTP authenticator app on their phone to take a picture of that QR image & load it into their app. Once the code is generated it does not change so in theory you should be able to share that code or QR image amongst yourselves & load it into your own apps. No data/mobile connection or SMS/email required unless you're using a specific TOTP app that needs that.
On Android I've used andOTP and Google Authenticator apps with good results but there are plenty of other TOTP authenticator apps if you look around.
PS - In terms of sharing it, just share the picture of the QR code with whatever screen/image capture tool you like to use. Just keep in mind you don't want to keep the QR image laying around online, the whole point is to secure your Mailchimp account after all.
Thank you, that’s very clear. I appreciate it!
the code can be a long string you can enter, but usually it's a QR image representing the code itself
There is usually an 'advanced' option if the 'QR doesn't work' that gives you access to the plain text data.
A TOTP app basically generates a token based on a secret key. If you share the secret key between the members of your group, any of them is able to generate the token. Maybe it is even possible to register several authenticators with different secret keys, then you would not need to share the key and, if a device gets lost, you could simply remove the compromised key from the list of valid keys.