Clickbait-y title, I know :D but I stand by it!
I noticed that many people still treat email like some sort of second-class citizen when it comes to personal information, and the urgency here is real. I think, in today's world where everything is in apps and requires an account, email has become even more important than your home address.
Why Your Email Is Your Digital Home
Think about it for a moment. What would happen to you if you lost access to your email and needed to change it? Now, compare that to changing your home address.
For the second one, maybe you'd need to change some delivery addresses, and update government documents and bills. But that's common practice, and most places probably have procedures to handle that, and it's still not that many places. It's a solvable chore.
Now think if you lost access to your email address. What would you have to do to fix it? Create a new one, fine. But how will you log into all of your apps where the identifier is the email address itself? You need to contact each of the companies through their customer service, which is often painful.
And think how many conversations you would have to have? Uber? Customer service. Netflix? Customer service. YouTube/Google? Customer service. It's just a nightmare.
Look at how many important things you are getting today in your emails. Invoices → email. Password resets → email. Security notices → email.
My point here is that email has become our second home address on the internet. And we use that one piece of personal information way more than our normal address these days.
The "How": Taking Control of Your Email
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