I was lucky enough to have had my (first - pretty nice little common username) Gmail account summarily culled towards the early years of my email usage. I was y

I was lucky enough to have had my (first - pretty nice little common username) Gmail account summarily culled towards the early years of my email usage. I was young and I hadn't used the email anywhere where it could get critical - I don't think I had anything critical in life at that time. Besides, my country hadn't moved to emails for personal communications and interactions - it never did, it just teleported into instant messaging. I was never given a reason. I tried to reach out and, of course, we know how it ends (even then). The thing is, I didn't even use it for anything other than sending emails to friends who were starting in other colleges and kind of just using emails for the sake of using emails. It was the new tool for me. Except one - the teenage me was in long and cosy exchanges with a nice someone many states and thousands of kilometres over talking about Jane Austen and Tolstoy and their works that we both read and loved and what not and also sharing with each other things I now definitely would not call poetry. That still feels like a loss - even after some two odd decades. The silliest thing - I didn't remember the email. Those were the good old days of r1d1clulux_paynthr_56789_b0mb@rediffmail.com. We never asked or revealed each other's names. Those were days like that when you didn't have to worry about whether you were talking to a cat or a fish. I started using other email services (Yahoo, Hotmail - for a long time those were my main emails) and when I started working I got a domain and moved to a paid email host. This also taught me a lesson about using free services. Hell, even when using a paid service this can happen. Apple is an example. You feel Google does it, oh boy oh boy, Apple knows how to do the true stonewalling! When you are on the phone with a real human being and that human being stonewalls you and their company (Apple) doesn't even allow that human being to help you, or escalate, or move up in the support chain, you feel that is real something - esp. if you are in a country where consumer laws are less than jokes! Anyway, so that taught me to be ready, to have backups (not just as in data, but as in options), and fallbacks. I think everyone should experience things like this, but kinda early in life :) PS. Naah, OP's case isn't like mine. But then people like me (and maybe OP and maybe you) allowed and enabled (still do) Googles and Apples of this world to be this big that they can just do it and get away with it and it doesn't even matter even in countries where consumer laws have real functioning teeth. So that's there.