This happened to me.

Hotmail was my email from 1997 until last year. I still know the password. But it wants me to do a security check. By sending a code to my backup email.

Problem is, I haven’t logged into my backup email in forever. So it wants to send a security code to my hotmail account.

…

…

You see the problem, right?

If Gmail goes belly up, you won’t have a problem. Every service will have a problem. You can just ride along with all the other customers.

All my shit is in the Google ecosystem. I am fairly confident that Gmail is not going away anytime soon. However, I am more afraid that some obscure ToS violation will forcibly disconnect me from their ecosystem, and I will have to scramble to make sure all my contacts have my alternate info. I am doubly screwed, as a Google Fi customer. If we all get suddenly degoogled, I lose a phone number that I have had for over 20 years.

As good a deal that Fi is for me (I normally don’t use bandwidth unless I travel internationally), I may switch soon just to reduce my exposure to Google.

I recently lost my oldest email and I didn’t plan accordingly. Roadrunner email. It’s still a pain in the butt. I’ve managed to change almost everything (that I can REMEMBER) to my newer email, but there are two that haven’t been changed because they require an email to the old email first… It’s gone.

That email was probably 20 years old and I have no idea what services I had signed up through it.

The moral of my story is to read emails from your email provider. Apparently they sent out warnings 6 months in advance, but I always ignored their emails.

The only way to protect yourself from something like this is to own your own domain name.
You can still use something like Google as a provider but you can switch providers and recreate the same email addresses.

I’d be fine. If my email provider goes away, my troubles are over, because my email provider is me!

I lost one, sent the emails I might need to another account. So that was ok but I forgot to change the email on every freaking service I use so it was very difficult to recover some accounts.

Get a domain and register an MX record.

If your email provider shuts down, forward the mail somewhere else.

Depends on how much you rely on it. If your contacts can’t phone or otherwise contact you for your new address, they’re gone.

If the services you use don’t mail you OTP codes on every log in, you can still log in using your old email and update it.

You can also contact customer support of some services and have them change it, using other ways to autheticate, e.g. physical letters with generated OTP codes.

I own my own domain and back up my emails. It would be a pain and cost a few $ but I’d migrate to something else or self host.