A few days ago, I received an innocuous email notification from my email provider informing me that my email address was expiring in a matter of weeks. I was a little miffed that there was no explanation of sorts, just an expiry date of my email address and a short note to save my emails if I wanted them. But I didn’t pay much attention to it then as I thought it was spam or some phishing email.

I became a little concerned later when I found the same exact notification in my other email account under the same provider. The emails do look legit with no horrible misspellings or suspicious links. Thus, I took to the twittersphere and postings from several other users confirmed it – the emails were bonafide.

Now I have a huge problem on my hands. Between the two accounts, I have thousands of emails dating back more than 10 years. If I was with any modern-day email provider, this wouldn’t be much of an issue since I’ll likely have POP3 access and could’ve easily exported my emails to another provider. But unfortunately my archaic provider only offers this as a premium feature.

This isn’t my biggest headache though. As much as I resent the fact that I’m about to lose two of my primary email addresses, I’m not going to lose the emails in them, at least not in the immediate term, since the provider is only selectively expiring some domains and not shutting down for good. The greater urgency here is in switching my current subscriptions and services tied to these email addresses to an alternative provider.

The monumental task is of course in identifying where I’ve been using these email addresses and finding out how I can change them on those sites. The quick-and-dirty way to get this done was to simply look through the senders list to figure out where they were being used. Although not foolproof or the most efficient, I thought it was fairly effective in identifying the majority of sites or services I have active subscriptions with.

In the end, I had to change email addresses on over 20 subscriptions across the two accounts though not a lot considering the fact that I’ve used these addresses for more than a decade. Fortunately, I didn’t need to update many of my contacts since personal correspondence over email had drastically declined over the years due to the advent of social networks and mobile messaging apps.

I think the one good thing that came out of this incident is that I got to weed out tons of irrelevant newsletters accumulated over the years but was too lazy to unsubscribe from. That, and a switch to a major modern-day email provider which gives me free POP3 access and hopefully makes the recurrence of such an issue close to nought.