User Authentication

Access to Your Personal Home Page

To access the protected area of our site, including your personal home page, you will need to enter your username (customer ID) and password when prompted to do so by your WWW browser. Your browser will usually remember the username and password during a session so you have to enter this information only once until you quit your browser.

We will also try to set an authentication cookie; if successfull, you will never have to enter your username and password yourself, because this information is transmitted automatically with the cookie. The cookie is persistent and should remain valid even when you quit and restart your browser. The cookie has an initial expiration time of one year and is peridically refreshed whenever you visit our server to prevent it from expiring.

If you do not have a customer ID yet, please register first. If you accessed the protected pages with our guest account before, your browser may still send us the guest user name instead of of your own username (the title of most pages display the username, so you can easily verify under which username you are logged in). If this happens you should quit and restart your browser.

You should keep your username and especially your password to yourself, but please record the information somewhere where you can find it if needed.

To avoid sending your password in cleartext over the Internet, we suggest that you use our secure server https://www.mathdirect.com/custom/ for all accesses to the protected area.

MathDirect will never ask you for your password, in fact we do not even know it, as it is stored in an encrypted form on our server. We cannot retrieve your password if you forget it.

Access Denied/Authorization Failures

If you get access denied errors (401), please carefully check the username and password you entered into your browser's Password dialog. Please note that username and password are case sensitive and that your username includes a hyphen (-) and a few more characters appended to the characters you chose yourself when you registered. You need to give all these characters in the User ID field of your browser's pop-up window.

If you continue to see your username as guest, even though you registered with your own username, please quit and restart your browser, as it may still send the old username and password to our server.

Account Activation

When you register, a confirmation email message is sent to your email address. It contains an activation code that you should enter in a form on our server. Detailed instructions will be contained in the email message itself.

If you do not receive this message within a day or so, there may be a problem with your email address. We will try to leave a message for you on this server (on your personal home page), if we receive an error message from the email system. You can also check your email address in your customer data record and correct it if you notice a typo. Whenever you edit your data, a new confirmation message will be sent.

If an account is not activated, it will be deleted in a couple of days.

Forgotten Password?

If you forgot your username or password, please fill in as much information as you can in this form (partial and approximate entries are OK). Clicking on Send Email will send the form by email to our registration desk and we will email a new, temporary password to the email address we have on file for you (which must agree with the email address you provide in this form). For obvious security reasons we will not send such a password to any other email address.