I’ve had my main email address, garymoore@btinternet.com, for twenty and a bit years. I’ve hung onto it mainly because lots of people know it. It’s caused some hassle though, because I’ve a relatively common name and other people with the same name have very similar email addresses. Which results in my frequently being signed-up with various sites and services, as well as receiving mail meant for other people.

It’s a very long time since I’ve had an account with BT, but, like many people, I hung onto the mail account. Quite a few years ago, BT began charging a nominal fee, £1.60 a month, for legacy email use. I happily paid this amount, even though the service is hosted by Yahoo and the webmail is ad-laden. A couple of weeks ago, though, in common with many people, I received an email from BT, advising that the charge would be rising to £5.00 a month.

Not a huge amount of money, but sixty quid a year for an email account is somewhat excessive. I only pay £28 a year for a domain name (this one), web space and unlimited email addresses. Which puts things into perspective and has made the decision to part with my old BT account easy.

Not so easy is remembering all of the accounts and transactions associated with this email address. I’ve set up Thunderbird on the PC, the first time I’ve used a proper e-mail application, apart from at work, in years. It seems to be struggling a little, but it’s currently in the process of downloading several years’ emails.