While I still have a grace period on my old email account with my old ISP, I've spent over ten hours this week switching my email logins from them to a new email address. It doesn't seem possible, but I've been putting at least two or three hours a night into it, not counting the core ones I already changed previously. I kept my passwords in a 5x8 notepad that was full. Part of them were in another notepad.
How does it take so long? Each page could have up to a dozen accounts on it. I didn't switch the ones I'm never going back to. Very few sites would let me automatically change my email address. Some of them I had to do a web search to find out how to change it. Apparently, you usually have to contact customer service for those. There were captchas. I had to click confirmation links in emails that could take minutes to arrive. Some of them never arrived, and I had to do them again. Even working on other logins while waiting for the mails only saved so much time. I had some passwords I could barely read or couldn't tell what a letter/number was. I had to try those multiple times. When you have a full notepad, spending from 1 to 3 minutes or more on a single login makes it take forever.
I learned a trick. If a web site says a password is invalid, even if the browser autofills it, that seems to mean they've deleted the account, though it's possible it's just deactivated. When I "restored" one of those passwords, I'd get a message thanking me for registering with the site. /facepalm It was a trick to get me to register. After seeing a few of those, I stopped doing that. If it's so old they can't remember me, I don't use them enough to make it worth the trouble of jumping through their hoops.
The worst offender was Google. I have an old YouTube channel from before Google bought YouTube that I wanted to delete. When I tried to log in, I was redirected to my "Google Account", which I had a separate login for with the same name. It wouldn't take my password. It turned out the YouTube password worked instead(Why?), but I had to jump through hoops because my device was unrecognized. LIE. The account was old enough that I couldn't pass the phone number challenge because I have a new number. As an alternative, I tried the Where do You Live challenge. I failed that, too. It turned out that, even though I was using my YouTube password instead of my Google Account password, they wanted they Where Do You Live answer from my Google account. Makes no sense. Once I figured that out, I couldn't tell if my where I live answer had a space in it or not. For security reasons, I didn't use my real city location. It didn't have a space. Finally, I had it all figured out! I started over. Again. They said I'd tried too many times, and wouldn't let me try again. I still haven't gotten it to work. I'm giving them 24 hours to reset it. It makes me want to cancel every Google account I have and use a different solution. I guess my migration away from them has begun. I already never log in to any site with my Google account. For security reasons, I have individual logins for everything. If you use Google to log into sites and you lose your phone, you're hosed.
As a side note on putting personal information in challenge questions, I never use real data. I don't tell them my first car or where I went to elementary school or any of that. Companies sell or share that information. I make up something unique that makes no sense. A few years back, Yahoo mail got hacked, and my challenge questions for multiple accounts were stolen along with the my passwords. Since I used fake information, the hackers couldn't use any of it to hack any of my other accounts, including my ISP account/mail account. It's an extra step, but it was a life saver when I needed it. None of the other companies I use that have been hacked has come back to haunt me either.
Have a great weekend.
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