Update on the Cyber Cleanse – Online Accounts

My last update on the Cyber Cleanse I have been conducting was at the end of March. What have I been up to since then?

It’s a bit like a tedious soap opera, with a few surprises as I go along.

Once I cleaned out my primary Gmail accounts, I needed to sift through all my other online accounts, those for which I was using these email accounts as the user name.

Let me say right here that we need to stop using email addresses as user names on accounts for precisely what I’ve been going through during this Cyber Cleanse – if you need to update your email address for whatever reason, you are stuck revisiting every single account to update the user name so you can continue to log in.

I did have a few accounts where the user name was not my email address, but they were the exception, not the rule.

I marched through account after account, updating my email address and coping with a lot of multi-factor authentication codes. While retrieving the codes from my phone was annoying, at least many accounts had this extra level of security, which is a good thing.

The account that was the worst, by very very far, to update was Verizon. It was a frustrating pain in the tuckus. Every time I’d try to make an adjustment, I’d get another multi-factor authentication notice on my phone that I’d have to deal with and the code wouldn’t go through properly and I’d be looped around to try to change the same thing over again. You would think a communications service like Verizon would make this easier, but it was a convoluted mess.

As I was working through updating my accounts, I discovered two Gmail accounts associated with past blogs that I had completely forgotten about. I shifted the administration of one blog over to my WordPress account, then I deleted the Gmail account.

For the other blog, I created an export of the data, made sure it was archived on the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine (it was!), then deleted the blog. I’ll delete the Gmail account associated with it in another month, which is when the blog will fully disappear.

At the same time, I’ll delete one of my primary Gmail accounts because I don’t have any email coming to it. With the Cyber Cleanse, the suggestion is that you leave email accounts you are clearing out open for at least a year in case you receive email from an account you have forgotten. I will be doing this for my final primary Gmail account, which is still receiving some email, though it has become a trickle since I shifted accounts to my new email address.

Over the past 6 months of my Cyber Cleanse, I have also investigated alternate blog platforms and am considering shifting to a new one. I have been paying for hosting this blog through a hosting service and have to manage all of the updates on the technical side. While it generally isn’t that difficult, it takes time, so I’m over it. I’m looking at a platform that will manage that for me for about $5 less per month than I am paying now.

I don’t have a timeline for shifting to a new platform, but thought you might like a little forewarning in case suddenly this blog looks different.

Stay tuned.

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