I have my own domain that I've been using for e-mail for the past few years. Most of my e-mail goes there, and then gets forwarded to a Yahoo! mail account, which in turn gets downloaded to my Macbook. This gives me a couple of nice features: I can read everything in the nice Mac Mail app when I'm at home, but I can also access everything via the web when I'm elsewhere.
Another nice feature was that I had the mail server configured such that anything@mydomain.com would get to me. This made it easy to essentially create new e-mail accounts whenever I needed a new one. For example, if Microsoft wants me to register for something, I'd give them "microsoft@mydomain.com" as my e-mail address. Since every website in the world wants my e-mail address, I figured that doing this would give me a way to create a different e-mail address for everybody who needs to contact me, making it easy to filter out stuff that I didn't want.
This worked great, until today. Today, my hosting provider, A2 Hosting, decided to disable the feature that automatically forwards everything to one place. Now, I need to create accounts or forwarders for every single address that I'd like to handle.
The problem is that I've been doing this for a long time, and I don't have a list of all the addresses I've used. Every business and every website I've interacted with in the past couple of years will no longer be able to contact me, unless I can remember them. So, now I'm not going to be getting a lot of e-mails that are important to me. I'm screwed.
The provider disabled this feature due to spam. It is too easy for spammers to just randomly generate e-mail addresses for every domain, and there is a cost to the provider for every e-mail they forward. I do sympathize, but it doesn't change the fact that I am now screwed by their policy change.
So, I think I need to find another hosting provider, so I can start getting e-mail again. Anybody out there happy with theirs?
Alternatively, I suppose I could write a script to find all the e-mail addresses for which I've received mail for the past couple of years. Switching providers sounds a lot simpler.