But Do I Really Need This? - Digital Downsizing

2024-11-24 - [53] 9:9

Probably about a month or 2 ago, I received a scam email claiming to be my email host, Zoho, saying my email hosting subscription was about to run out and I needed to pay to continue using them as a host. When I saw that email, I thought to myself "That's weird, I have the free plan" but then I remembered that my IMAP support was grandfathered in. The email looked quite convincing and while I didn't fall for it, I almost did. The only thing that prevented me from falling for it was the fact that the email client I use, Mutt, doesn't handle HTML emails, so I had to save the HTML content to a file and open that in a graphical web browser, taking up some time and giving me time to process what was going on.

After getting that scam email, I realized that it was completely under Zoho's control when they would stop IMAP support for grandfathered free accounts. They haven't announced anything saying they'd stop support, but about 2 weeks ago, they changed the imap and smtp sendpoints for the grandfathered accounts.

Fastforward to about a week ago when I added the "titan" subdomain to vigrey.com via a CNAME record through my domain name registrar. While adding that subdomain, I noticed that the domain name registrar supported email forwarding. That got me thinking about using Zoho for my email hosting, to the point where I asked "but do I really need this?". Keeping Zoho would give me IMAP and SMTP support (for now), where switching to email forwarding would only allow me to receive emails to vi@vigrey.com, not to send as vi@vigrey.com. While I wouldn't be able to send as vi@vigrey.com, it would allow me to delete my Zoho account, shrinking the amount of accounts I rely on.

I decided to switch to email forwarding and delete my Zoho account. The process seemed to work successfully, and now I only need to manage a single email account. I'm also now down to only 11 accounts needing to be stored in my password manager, although only 9 of them are for external online accounts.

At some point, I need to take stock of what things I'm using digitally and what things I actually need. It's important to have backups for things so you can recover from a catastrophic event, but it's easier to recover via a backup if you don't have to back all that much up. It's frequently easier to travel or pick up where you left off or change plans if you pack light.

Contact/Reply

If you would like to reply to this post, feel free to send me an email or misfin message.

=> Email: vi@vigrey.com | Misfin: vi@vigrey.com