How can I handle a 20-years old email adress being de-activated?

Question

20 years ago, my parents subscribed to a 56k Internet Access with French national ISP. With it came two free email adresses, and one of them has been created for 5-year-old me.

Since 20 years, I have considered this email adress as the only constant in my online presence. It is my login on every single place I subscribed, and I have never filled other password recovery means, since I considered this email adress to be always accessible.

Fast forward to now, my folks want to unsubscribe and use only their 4G phones to do what little they have to do with the internet.

I have vetoed it for the time being until I can find an answer to the following question.

I am subscribed to hundreds of sites with an email adress that is bound to disappear. I have forgotten about most of these sites, but cannot be sure I will never need to access the accounts again.

Is there any way I can easily transition to an other email adress, such as gmail stuff, or make the whole process less tedious than changing my email adress on so many sites?

Answer 1

On this occasion, there's nothing much you can do. There's no quick and easy way to change your email addresses globally. But you can stop it from happening again by registering a domain name of your own and paying a few dollars a year to have those emails forwarded wherever you want.

Answer 2

"...whole process less tedious than changing my email adress on so many sites"

Nope!

There is no automatic way to resolve this. You will need to manually get everyone moved over to the new email address.

My suggestion is to KEEP that email/provider, for the time being. Set up a new email address which isn't tied to an ISP (and possibly learn why it's a bad thing to use ISP based email addresses). Set up an Automatic Reply to your current email which says something like "I have a new email address, please use that. Your email will not be forwarded." (I advise to not give the new email, it could encourage spam). And for each eamail that comes in, update the person (reply to them) or company (log in / call them).

Over time you should see a reduction in emails. Only you can then decide when to stop the current ISP but if some one hasn't emailed you for a year you need to ask is it that important/concerning. If it's distant family, then can they at least pick up the phone or see you on social media etc.

As for sites that you may have forgotten about (and sorry, this is due to your bad organisaation), do you really care? How many of these websites which you hardly use is going to cause any issue by re-registering?

Finally, some ISP's will let you keep email addresses (for this type of reason). If this is the case, then keep the forwarder on!