Right, and I think that fact that I, as the valid account holder, have been placed in a category of indistinguishable from someone social engineering access to

Right, and I think that fact that I, as the valid account holder, have been placed in a category of indistinguishable from someone social engineering access to my account, simply for not updating a recovery email, makes it all the more irritating. It is trivially easy for google to validate if the email in use is still valid. I haven’t cared to look into the inner workings of email but surely there is also a host signing key for emails too, or some kind if protocol level handshake. Anyway, my only hope is being okay spending more money to buy the domain. When / if that happens, I will make it possible for anyone else to recover their old email with it.