Let’s start with the Salt Cup of things.
You’re likely reading this here on a less common gTLD, that is, lick.blue. You’ve seen all the dot-coms, dot-nets, dot-orgs, and the country codes in general, and now there’re these colorful new gTLDs, like .abogado (lawyers and law firms!), .dog (downward facing — oh, wait, that’s .yoga; this one’s just a good one), .soy (I am!), among many others.
For those of us who want our internet presences to reflect who we really are as a person, we might choose one of the newer generic Top Level Domains, like my choice of lick.blue, or a yoga center going with their name and ending in .yoga.
However, there are businesses who use old, ancient as hell methods for user tracking and registration, either in the form of a legacy script that someone cribbed off HotScripts, or some other not-updated way to see if an email address might exist, or, of course, linking registrations inexorably to a single email address.
So for a person who might’ve registered something back when all they could have and know was a Google Mail or America Online email address, but then wants to move on to their custom neverkick.rocks email with that company, it’s nigh impossible.
It’s 2021. This really should not be the norm. In a company’s database, a global unique ID could easily have been generated for the user, divorcing the concept of “the email address is the only way” from “oh hey, new digs? Nice! I’ll update my address book.”
To wit, I’ve been able to change a lot of email addresses today, from the two major theaters in the area (Thank you, Regal and Cinemark), to one of my grocery store accounts (Good work, FredMeyer!), the US Postal Service, and Monoprice.
Where things fell short, of course, were with businesses like Subway, who insists that they can’t update my email address (so I nuked my account, not like I eat there anyway) and World Market, who can’t get it straight. So I’m waiting for that account to go away.
It’s a frustration, but one borne of wanting to close up several unfulfilling holes.