need new e-mail addy soon?

The first e-mail address I ever got was the one I'm using now, at UBC.  I 
got it back in 1994, after coming home from an archaeological trip to the 
U.K. and getting the addresses of all the people there who had expressed 
interest in keeping in touch.  I still have some of those addresses in my 
address list, even though I haven't sent anything to those people or 
received anything from them in over a decade.  But anyhoo.

Lately, UBC has been dropping hints that it will abandon the Netinfo / 
Interchange e-mail system that they've been using since whenever.  And I 
just noticed that the my.ubc.ca website includes a message now saying that 
this changeover will happen in August, at least for students.

It is not clear to me how, or when, this will affect alumni accounts such 
as mine.  But, after holding on to this account for so long, just for 
sheer purposes of momentum and continuity, I now find myself thinking I 
will probably need a new e-mail account in the next few months, and I will 
probably have a loooooot of profiles and accounts to update (here, at 
Facebook, at Amazon.com, etc., etc., etc.).

Side note:  There are certainly e-mail lists that I'm on, where I wouldn't 
mind if the people in question happened to lose track of me... but I'm 
also a little nervous about updating my contact info with certain 
publicists.  They might ask who I'm writing for now, and, um, I don't want 
to admit to them just yet that I'm currently *between* writing gigs... 
which is to say, I'm not really writing for anyone at the moment, though I 
hope to be once the kids are in kindergarten, or thenabouts ...

Anyway.  What to do?  I don't like Yahoo's interface.  Gmail seems to be 
okay, but I've already got an account that I started for my blog (at 
Blogger, natch), and while I do use that account for all my other Google 
stuff (like my Android, my Google Contacts, my Google Calendar), I'm not 
sure I'm ready to make that my personal e-mail thingamajig.

What I'm really going to miss is writing my e-mails in Pine, or whatever 
system I'm using right now.  Until a few years ago, it was possible to 
Telnet into my account; now, I'm using PuTTy.  Would it still be possible 
to PuTTy into whatever account I have *after* this?  (Hmmm, would it be 
possible to do that with my existing Gmail account?  I don't know.)

And then there's my e-mail archiving.  Until the summer of 2000, the only 
way to download my e-mails to my hard drive was to copy each e-mail folder 
as a single massive block of text; if I want to search for anything in my 
e-mails from that era, I have to open the file in WordPad or some such 
thing and do a word search within the open file.  (And Windows, alas, 
seems to think the files are too big to scan, so that if I want to know 
*which* of the massive folders has a particular word or name, I have to 
open each folder individually and search within it until I find it.)

*Since* the summer of 2000, UBC has let me download zip files whenever I 
download each folder, so that I now have each and every e-mail as an 
individual file (with a related subfolder containing attachments, if any). 
So I've been downloading zip files and extracting their contents ever 
since.

If I were to switch to another e-mail provider, though, how would I be 
able to back up my files?  Would I, indeed, be able to?

Hmmm.  I suspect someone here is going to mention Outlook Express or 
something.  But the one time I tried it (for reasons I can't remember 
right now), I didn't like it.

Sigh.  I hate change.

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