The pain of a spoofed email address

I’m republishing some of my social media content - this was posted on LinkedIn earlier this year.

One of my email addresses got spoofed. An email address I've used for more than 14 years, and that I used to sign up for a couple hundred sites. I know that doesn't mean people have access to all my online stuff, but I'm still taking precautions. Plus I am sick of the hundreds of bounce notifications for emails I never sent. My plan is to delete that email address eventually, but first I need to make sure I can still get into the sites I need to, which has meant a drawn out process.

I started by changing my email on the sites I use all the time. (I don't have any financial logins saved - I just have to remember them.) And I've been gradually getting to other sites. I'm now down to about 30 sites where either:

- there is no easy account deletion option

- there is no easy email change option

- the verification email for signing in never arrived

It is also unbelievably difficult to change my email in Slack because I'm signed into a few accounts and the web interface (because you can't change it in the app) keeps defaulting to ONE of those accounts.

I swear, I'm going to start looking for the email change and account deletion process before I sign up for anything else. This is painful!