The state of email accounts and providers
Hello everyone. This is my first post here (yay!) and so let’s get into it.
I’d like to start by discussing how annoying it is to get an email account from a popular provider. For this blog, I was looking for another email account. I didn’t want to use Proton or Tuta as I wanted integration with Thunderbird. So I looked at popular services like Gmail (shudder). Well, I learned the abomination that it has become in terms of tracking.
To even register for an account, they require that you use a non-voip number that has not “been used too many times.” This is to “make sure you’re not a robot.” Listen Google, If I wanted to make a bot that signed up for tons of accounts, I could just buy a ton of E-sims. But I don’t, I want privacy. And what happened to the tried and tested method of a captcha? Something tells me that you are not just trying to make sure that I’m not a bot, but you’re trying to collect my data?!? (Never would’ve guessed).
So then (after failing to find a phone number that they would accept), I went over to Microsoft with Outlook.
That went even worse, every time I tried an email address, it was saying that it existed, even though it obviously didn’t
(I mean. I think. If you are the proud owner of contactjacob.encrypted_44712@outlook.com, please feel free to email me).
After this, I tried… Yahoo. Yep, Yahoo. And let me tell you, It sucked. After filling out the create an account form, it just said that I had tried too many times. (And this was my first time) So I tried a few more times and even looked up the error. Yahoo’s response was just to wait 24 hours which I was not willing to do.
I didn’t want to rely on some obscure provider though so I looked up what might be happening wih Microsoft. As it turns out (which they don’t mention anywhere on the email creation page), you can’t create an email with the word “contact” in it. So, after learning this delightful fact I went back to Outlook and successfully made an account.