# 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

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Email: vi@vigrey.com [Email]
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