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by woodruffw 1834 days ago
It occurs to me that I don't have an exhaustive list of all of the accounts that I've signed up to over the years with my email address.

If I'm banned by my provider, I won't have any recourse for many of them except to discover at some point in the future that I've missed an important alert, billing statement, or notice of action. And that's even before I know that I need to go to a physical location or mail in some kind of identification!
1 comments
asdfasgasdgasdg 1834 days ago
You can as easily have the same problem with physical mail, but that doesn't confer an indefinite right to a particular physical address. I do encourage keeping backups of your email to reduce this risk -- at least you can search your records that way.
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woodruffw 1834 days ago
> You can as easily have the same problem with physical mail, but that doesn't confer an indefinite right to a particular physical address.

Of course not! But the USPS has (virtually) free change-of-address forwarding[1], and we have an entire set of social and governmental institutions pre-built around the impermanency of physical addresses. No such institutions exist for digital addressing.

I agree, re: backups, and I keep them for myself. But it occurs to me that the average non-technical individual probably doesn't know how to make a backup of their GMail account. I use GSuite, and the last time I checked I had to explicitly enable IMAP and then set a custom "app password" in order to set up IMAP access for my backup client. Oh, and there was some Google-specific TLS weirdness; boundaries abound.

[1]: https://www.usa.gov/post-office#item-37197

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asdfasgasdgasdg 1834 days ago
> No such institutions exist for digital addressing.

I do think it would be optimal if there were a fallback option for all types of digital accounts. It is not Google's fault, though, that there isn't, as they are not the cause of the assumption of email address permanence. You need to lay your blame at the feet of the service providers.

I do also think it might be ideal if Google would forward emails to an address of your choosing in the event they closed your account.

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