It's a digital life equivalent of a motorcycle accident I think. The risk is catastrophic, so any incidence rate is enough to require being prepared for it.

At first I thought that losing access to my gmail would be pretty bad, but now that I think about it, I don’t see anything particularly troublesome if it happens tomorrow, let alone catastrophic. Can you give some examples?

If you owm the email's domain you can switch the domain Mx record and continue just fine. But over the years a lot of accounts end up tied to Google SSO and if you are just using a plain old @gmail and have tied all your accounts to it you are probably in trouble.

I’m not a business. I don’t use domains or SSO. Yes, I use my gmail address as a login to many websites, but losing access to gmail does not mean I can’t login to those websites anymore. It just means recovering an account is more difficult (but in most cases not much more difficult). And I do export my gmail inbox every year as a backup.

Fair enough, if you feel like you have a handle on your personal situation and are comfortable with the level of risk then by all means don't be worried. When I say catastrophic, I don't necessarily mean catastrophic to your entire life with no way forward. I just mean your digital life will be pretty toast and you'll have to start again on a lot of platforms that don't make the email changeover easy. That's not going to be true for everyone either. If you've got nothing important online, nothing to worry about.

> but losing access to gmail does not mean I can’t login to those websites anymore. It just means recovering an account is more difficult (but in most cases not much more difficult).

I think this is pretty naive though, this thread is really a story about how automated systems are making the digital world more challenging to navigate and how getting a human to help you is becoming harder in many cases, making those automated decisions final. If all you needed to sign up for something was your email address, it's possible they will have no way to verify you are the owner if you lose access to that, even if you can get in contact with a human.

Well, if I lose access to gmail the first thing I do will be switching all important online services to a new email.

I’m curious though, which online services would be really bad to lose access to (for you personally)?

How are you going to log in to anything using Google SSO? It's not the email address that logs you in, it's the authentication handshake from your google account. Anything using 2FA, or one time passcodes to your email address for new devices?

One example is when I lost access to an email account tied to a Digital Ocean account. It had been hosting a project VM and I never had a need to log in to it until the project shut down. I try and log in and although the credentials are right, it needs me to verify a one time code from my email address to prove I am not a bot. Couldn't do that. I never gained access back, DO required me to give them a full suite of proof of ID before I could even get them to disconnect my credit card, and even to this day it periodically restarts charges against my card and I have to contact them. Each time they escalate to engineering and engineering says they "Fixed the issue". Now times that experience by potentially dozens of accounts.

I never use my personal gmail account for anything work related. For 2FA I always use my phone.

But I agree that there might be situations where it could be bad, especially if you work as a consultant/freelancer, and/or own a small business.