A little reminder of what is possible...
How can I move all my email to a different service?
Q
"More than 10 years ago, I had an internet connection from BT, which came with a btopenworld email address. At some point, BT passed all the management of these email addresses to Yahoo, where they became standard, free (advertising-supported) Yahoo webmail addresses in all but name - run on Yahoo servers, with the Yahoo front end. When my BT Internet contract ended, my BT email service carried on at Yahoo.
All this was fine until BT informed me that it would close the account and delete all my mail, contacts etc from 16 September unless I started to pay them £1.60 a month for a premium mail service I don't want.
Do you think this is ethical behaviour? Should we all stop trusting even large companies running ad-supported cloud-based services because, at any point, they can threaten to delete our data, and make us pay the high costs in time and effort of changing an email address, if we don't pay up? Is there any easy way to avoid being held to ransom, and transfer all my mail and contacts easily from one account to another?
Name withheld."
A
"To answer your last question first: no, you should not trust any cloud-based company, whether large or small, with data that you consider important. If you have files that you must not lose - emails, documents, photographs, whatever - then you and only you are responsible for making sure you don't lose them.
It's a fact of life that small companies become big and big companies become small or go out of business as the technology scene changes. This can happen on relatively short timescales, perhaps five to 20 years, whereas you may want to keep your data for long periods, perhaps 10-50 years. In some cases, you may want your files to outlive you. Examples include family photos and videos, creative works and recordings of original or otherwise unobtainable music...."
Some interesting solutions to many email concerns...
http://www.theguardian.com/technology/askjack/2013/sep/12/how-move-my-email-yahooIgnorance is bliss, bliss is happiness, I am happy...to draw your attention to the possible connectivity in the foregoing.