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Comment by fs111 | Hacker News Reader

There are plenty email providers out there. Free and paid. It should not be a problem for anyone to switch. Moving off of Gmail doesn't mean to self host. It is a bit of work to tell anyone about your new address, but that's it.

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What about the hundreds of other accounts that use your gmail as either the 2FA target or password reset?

For a non-technical user (like my mom), this is a herculean task.

If you need a password reset do it and use the reminder to change the email. If your mom signed up for hundreds of accounts she should be saavy enough to handle the account update.

There's no need to delete the old gmail account, just use the new account for anything new, and change the mail address to the new one for the few frequent and useful accounts.

Over time, the old gmail account will lose its importance, and there'll be no real risk if Google decides to ban it.

Changing upwards of 200 logins to use a new email address may be troublesome. Do you keep a list?

When I switched away from Gmail, I used my password manager to track the logins I needed to change. Then, just monitored the Gmail inbox for anything I missed.

First, I saved every login on Bitwarden and then used that to visit every website and changed login email info there and re-saved on Bitwarden.

The effort is only one time or one day at max. And the rewards are worth the time.

There's another catch, many services use the email address as an immutable identifier that cannot be changed. For some that doesn't matter, but at the very least it is a lot of time/effort.

A lot of those can be solved by contacting the support of that service. Services that don't allow you to change emails are usually on the smaller side and so you might actually get a response.

Yes, my password manager

Unlike sibling commenters, I used to not use a password manager. (But do now!)

I just keep the old GMail for now, and whenever I receive a valid email there, I visit the sender website to update it.

This depends on you remembering your "low-volume important accounts" like government websites you visit once a year, but otherwise, I would not cry if my imgur account got lost or something eventually.

Would be nice for companies to maintain a standard account management API which password managers could call. Imagine buttons on your password manager: "Set All Emails..." and "Randomize All Passwords..." I didn't find any such standard after a quick search.

Edit: Looks like LastPass does it with a screen scraper https://support.logmeininc.com/lastpass/help/how-do-i-update...

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