Metro Manila Community Quarantine - Day 684
As I was settling down for bed last night, I noticed one of those ACTION REQUIRED Google emails come in. It turns out that my G Suite legacy free edition associated with this blog was going to be retired in a few months, so I was being asked to upgrade to a paid version of Google Workspace to main things like my blog-specific email account.
Allow me to explain.
When I decided to purchase custom domains for my Blogger blogs (versus the typical Blogspot addresses), I acquired them directly through Blogger, which on the back end was facilitated by (then) Google Apps through a reseller agreement with domain providers like Enom. Since Google Apps was the billing agent, they also threw in their basic tier of service, so I got free domain email services (along with all the other fun Google things) every time I set up a new blog with a custom domain. Given my three blogs - my personal, the Geeky Guide, and Baduy Pride, then I had three other email accounts to use for whatever.
Of course, their main purpose was to provide somewhere for advertisers to send their inquiries, guest blog requests, and whatever else so things would seem a bit more professional. But eventually, I started to use some of them as filtering emails for things like newsletter sign-ups, and other non-essential accounts.
Over time, they started curtailing the benefits of this limited Google Apps service starting with limiting the number of users to single digits, so I figured I'd lose it eventually. I was surprised that it still migrated to the Google Workspace branding in 2020, but I didn't give it much thought.
Last night's email was the death knell for this part of my life...and a rather troubling reminder of how comfortable I had gotten with using these domain email addresses. In fact, I had used them even for things like my Amazon and Lazada accounts among others. And while the specific email reminder was for the accounts related to this personal blog, I know it's only a matter of time before the others follow suit.
And this was just as I was weighing whether it was time to shift my domains over from the Enom reseller agreement to Google Domains directly. I just didn't make any changes now since (1) my domains won't expire for a few months still and (2) I wasn't sure what was going to mail to my domain emails once I canceled the old deals. Now I know.
So in between my different conference calls today, I started combing through all my different accounts to try and figure out which ones were associated with my domain emails. The fact that I still use LastPass as my password manager actually came in handy since I was able to filter through my list of accounts by login and that helped me find most of the major ones - or at least the ones that I still bother to log into since I maintain password records.
It was quite an interesting trip down memory lane since I found a lot of accounts associated with websites that no longer exist or services I haven't used in ages. My digital journey has had a lot of interesting twists and turns, at least based on the different things I created logins and accounts for. Super random: my Kongregate account is still alive.
I'm mostly out of the woods at this point, save for a few that I had to write into their respective customer support teams to get my login email addresses updated on the backend. The actual shutdown won't actually trigger until July of this year, but it's safer to get things settled sooner rather than later. Imagine me losing access to my Kindle, Audible, and comiXology libraries should I let my Amazon account lapse? What a nightmare that would be!
Once I get the last of the accounts cleaned up, I'll probably start processing my domain transfers a little earlier if only to mitigate any complications from my Workspace accounts shutting down or getting suspended. I've mainly moved most of my stuff over to my main Gmail address while the others are demoted to my (surprisingly still alive!) Yahoo Mail account. I probably should have been more generous with shifting more of them over to Yahoo, but I don't know how long that one's going to last either (LOL).
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