nam02.safelinks.protection.outlook.com

Hey Becky! I just stumbled upon your post and felt – even though I realize it’s very old by now – that I’d like to say something. First off; my rationale for providing input at all is the simple fact of how strongly I can relate. I’ve been fortunate enough to catch a [lastname]@hotmail.com in the ‘90s and later on, a [firstname]@[lastname].net domain and chose that e-mail. I’ve been finding myself in your shoes with the hotmail-address trying to fend off all spam while making sure not to miss out important stuff. That fight is practically lost on the hotmail address but still going flawless with my private domain mail. Anyway. I am from Sweden and a couple of years ago, the whole European community was forced to implement legislation that was decided on the EC level; namely the so-called GDPR that only serves to protect personal information (broadly defined as ~ anything that could be connected to an individual).. at least for the first year, it was just a pain in the **bleep** to be frank but now we are starting to see the benefits of it. For example, your personal information cannot be processed by anyone unless you explicitly have agreed to. Moreover, it’s forbidden to sell or otherwise transfer such information to a third-party without your explicit consent. You have a so-called right to be forgotten, whereby an organization or corporation is forced to delete any and all information related to you and you also have a right to get an identical copy of every single bit of data that they have that relate to you. This is called portation. I was kind of flabbergasted when I tried this with Google since it took a couple of days for them to complete my request which ended up in the form of an email with links to approximately 15 separate compressed files, each several gigabytes in size. Probably you can trace my every single footstep since 15 years back, literally every single step – left and right(!) 😉 – not only online but off-line as well. Kinda scary. So when we’ve had some time with this new legislation, I do believe that it actually have brought more positive dumb bad and could definitely serve as inspiration for the US to pick some bits and pieces from. I would definitely contact my politicians in your shoes. Last but not least; I definitely know and relate to the fact that you kind of get attached to your email address. But since it seems like there is gonna be difficult in the long term to keep the SPAM at the Bay, I would definitely recommend you to buy a personalized domain with the hosting that includes email that you can buy in like a minute for 10 bucks; especially since there’s YouTube domains released constantly and you can find pretty cool ones nowadays that suits your personality or where you’re from, profession or your last name for example. Wish you all the best! 👊 / JJ :sweden: [I dictate everything I “write” on my phone which generally causes a couple of grammatical or spelling mishaps. It should however be clear, based on the context, what I actually intended to say.]