I was clearing out my email this morning and closing down some of the mailing lists and other elements that I don’t use, and removing others.

I’ve been an Oracle OTN member for years, but no longer get as much out of it as I used to. I almost thought about cancelling, but instead decided to try and change the email address on the account so that it would go into my ‘mailing lists’ account rather than an even older account that I will one day shut down for good.

But I can’t.

Why not? Because Oracle’s software doesn’t let me. It says so quite clearly in the FAQ.

Does the inability for Oracle to manage my data in an effective way worry you? It worries me. Changing an email address is surely something that many people must have to do as they change companies or ISPs, but apparently Oracle didn’t think about this when designing the system.

The solution? Unsubscribe from the newsletters for your existing account and create a new one. I did the first half of that, but I really can’t be bothered to do the second half.