The suggestions for email addresses if yours was already taken used to include what you entered plus the last two digits of your birth year. I wonder how many people born in 1988 followed that advice and now deeply regret it.
The first part of my email has remained unchanged since about then. I've gone through various services though. AOL, Earthlink, Hotmail, Yahoo, Gmail, and now Proton.
I also have a first.last@gmail address I keep for anything more formal (resume).
Last year my email address - initialslastname@gmail.com - was added to the group list for a bunch of old ladies in England. First I was advised of my spot on the flower roster for the church, then I got someone's holiday photos, a reminder that Gerald's birthday was on the 9th, a lovely eCard congratulating me on my wedding anniversary... on and on.
I tried deleting them but they kept coming, and I worried about all the cool stuff initialslastname was missing out on. I sent an email to the whole group saying stop it & got a heartfelt apology and promises to correct it, but the emails have kept on coming - they all have me in their address books now. If I wasn't so lazy it would be a good incentive to move fully to my proton address.
Tmy name is just common enough to never be available anywhere, until Outlook.com addresses were new. Got firstlast@outlook magically. Really just one guy in Australia though it seems that doesn't realize he's not getting any of those emails. I figure that his actual email is probably something like first.last@outlook and he misses the dot sometimes.
Note that if you let your domain lapse and someone else registers it afterwards, that person will also gain control over your e-mail address (and likely all accounts associated with it, if they are not secured with an additional factor of authentication / recovery).
It is possible and even good to change your email. I wrote an email service called Port87, and changed my email twice during the process. It really sucks how much work it is, but it’s worth it. Every email service that’s been around for decades just sucks. They survive on the fact that it’s hard to change your email.
Yeah the hardest part is going around and updating your address with sites you use.
Every time I've done it, I've also put an auto forward on my old address, and a label or other alert for anything that comes through from the old so I can go update it or block that address from auto forwarding.
I bought a domain. Then I went about making a new mail for each site I registered at. That way when I start getting spam to that address I know it's been leaked and I just kill it.
I thought of doing something like that. I bought my original ISP's domain and use my second ever email from time to time. My first email address was a old numeric compuserve email address.
Most or all e-mail services allow you to create e-mail aliases, which are alternate e-mail addresses that deliver to the same mailbox and use the same login.
I love it when coworkers or clients in my job accidentally use their personal emails, they always have stupid names and after knowing someone only professionally it really throws me through a loop in a good way lol