Well, the Email Did Not Find Me

Photo by Ben Kolde on Unsplash

I have several emails. A few for official stuff and work, and a few for blogging, social media, shopping and whatever random online garbage and subscriptions. I don’t put my phone number on most of them. My policy with privacy is, I’d share my details – name, email, phone number, photo and address – only when it is absolutely necessary. I'm not even on WhatsApp or Facebook. And as if I were some kind of a secret agent, I don’t keep my browsing history either. Uploading government IDs? It better be because of a life-or-death situation.

Then in January, in the middle of registering for an H&M account because my broke ass needed the 10% discount, right in the store, my Yahoo email account asked me to get a code from its recovery email, which was a Gmail. They did this all the time, and it was never a problem. I’d enter the password on Gmail, and I’d be in.

But that day, the Gmail account asked for a recovery code from that Yahoo! Fuck. That, my friend, is what we call being stuck in a recovery loop hellscape, where two emails are each other’s recovery email. And because I was impatient and didn’t know the consequences of my actions, I kept trying until the two pages got stricter and stricter with the sign-in options. And because sharing phone numbers was a no-no for a secret agent like me, of course, these two emails were not attached to any phone number.

For a week, I scoured the internet for ways to get my emails back and tried the suggestions. What was disheartening was, the internet basically said, without my phone number, my emails were gone. And apparently, this was even made worse because I cleared my cache and history all the time, and I didn’t connect to WiFi. The hotspot from my phone changed my location to all over the country all the time – so, the emails were even warier at my every login attempt because they now thought, this is new, this looks foreign, this doesn’t say normal.

How could I lose these emails? I’d had them for years! And I’d painstakingly arranged them so that they wouldn’t be in the same handles as the online accounts they were attached to. There are emails that I can give away, and there are emails that no one knows. These two emails that I lost were not those I used for work, but I still needed them. There were info and an online life attached to these two emails. It was not the end of the world, but losing and replacing them would still be a nuisance.

But there was one advice on the internet that said, wait for a month before trying again. So I did. Because why not. I’d practically lost them anyway. What is one month.

So I tried again last week. And lo and behold, the sign-in page of one of the emails had changed. It only asked for a confirmation of recovery email and my phone number. My control-freak self and I, who would avoid giving my phone number at every turn, had never felt so overjoyed about serving my privacy on a platter. And bling! I got my emails back!

I might have been even a little smug at that moment. I didn’t think I’d get back the emails at all.

Most of my emails are attached to my phone number now. I've successfully starting the year by caving to privacy intruders because I wanted to save my stupid emails.

But why was it only a problem this year, though? Were there some kind of new T&Cs introduced? Did I accidentally click on anything? Because I very much want to reverse this step.