Usernames

While I've been with Telstra, I've had numerous types of internet connection, including dial up, ISDN ( which is a joke, by the way ), and wireless. One big issue for me has been that if you have a dial up account, for example, and upgrade to ISDN, for example ( and ISDN is just dial up through two phone lines ), you can't keep your username between account types. Thank goodness for gmail. I've been online for coming up to two decades, and I've had many email addresses, and changing your email address is always a hassle, and always causes you to lose contact with people. As a result, I don't check any of my BigPond email addresses, because I know how fragile they are, I am careful not to ever use them, because I did that once, only to find that my address was going to be deactivated, despite my continued intention to be a BigPond customer. It's clear that whoever wrote these systems was taking a lot of shortcuts, or plain did not care. I do love, as a software developer, to be told that it's just 'not possible' to perform some basic task, from someone who basically accepts that must be true, because it's true for their system. Yes, it would be possible, if your systems were designed properly.