Email business.

Life Back when this blog was but a fledgling, it was being written while I was still using dial-up at home via a BT Surftime account with an included email address - which I quickly stopped using after beginning this mess and adopting its title and so for years my email address was feelinglistless@btopenworld.com.  You might have used it yourself.

When I migrated over to a 3 dongle for my broadband, 15gb limit a month and such, and asked to cancel the Surftime account, so I could keep the BT email open I continued paying £1.60 per month to maintain it, partly out of laziness but also because it seemed as though there were enough services which would not allow me to transfer over without some fiddly business.

Imagine my surprise when I received my credit card statement and found the charge had increased to eight pounds and some pence.  With the service depreciating, BT have increased the cost of what's not called a "BT Premium email" service to £5 per month, something which they entirely failed to inform me about and I only discovered after some frenetic Googling.

A lengthy phone call later, in which it took an advisor ten minutes to realise what my query was and find my details, it was explained to be the extra three pounds and change was essentially the difference for the previous month I'd already paid for, they having decided to put the price up retrospectively.  I know.  I don't understand.

Which left me with choices.  Pay the £5 a month which over time is a bit steep really.  Connect the email account to our current broadband package which also happens to be with BT which I wouldn't want to do because I liked keeping them separate and wouldn't want to mess things up further.  Or cancel the account altogether.

With a perfectly good gmail account set up, I've since spent the past two days working through six months worth of emails sent to the BT account (and forwarded on to my gmail anyway) trying to find everything which is connected to that old email and deleting it.  As expected this has been fiddly, especially in relation to fruit based devices and methods of payment.

Dozens of mailing lists cancelled and resubscribed to.  A PR database which has been quite useful which I ended up having to make telephone call to.  Music services, film streaming services, my whole virtual life.  Slowly, slowly realising just how connected we become to email accounts and how used to them we become.

But I think I'm there or at least very close.  The folder I set up via a filter is empty and I'll simply watch it for a few weeks now to see what else appears in it.  I'm sure I've forgotten something and it's going to be interesting when I get there to discover how it's possible to recover the account if the primary email address no longer exists.

So if you're trying to contact me from now onwards, my email address is stuartianburns@gmail.com having swooped in early when they were still in beta (would you believe) and grabbed my full name.  Now I'm just going to have to remember to use it when signing into the innumerable places which previously used the other one.