Emails

I've changed my email address - for the first time in about 8 years. The existing one is still working for the moment (which is just as well) buy I hadn't realised what a complete pain in the neck this was going to be. I still haven't sent out an email to all my contacts but what is really causing me grief is the number of firms and websites which I'm signed up to - many of which now use email addresses as their user ID.

On the face of it, having the email address as the user ID is a good idea. I have enough trouble remembering passwords and, for infrequently used sites, I can often not remember my login ID either. This leads to either a huge number of reminder emails - half of which will be lost in my Spam filter - or just re-registering with the site again. Many of the ones that I do have problems remembering are actually for important things like credit card accounts and utilities. So I can't even just ignore them and give up as a bad loss.

My first deadline for this is the end of this month. I will be swapping employers so my old works email will stop working. Very few people actually use this (at least very few that I care about) so this isn't such a great loss but I do have many registrations with firms like Microsoft and Oracle which are a pain in the neck to set up and will probably take me the best part of a day to go through again. After that I may be swapping my broadband provider and, since I have my email registered with them, my personal email address goes down the Suwannee as well. This is more of an issue as I have always tried to keep anything non-work related on that email and I really can't remember everything I've subscribed to off the top of my head (although given the amount of Spam I get that may be a good thing).

Anyway, I've tried amending this blog. If this is the last ever entry, you'll know that I've cocked it up.