Did you end up sticking with the same company or did you shop around after that? My camera got lifted in Lisbon last year and I was out the whole thing because I never got the coverage, still kicking myself over it. Glad your host pushed you into it, feels like those little pushes are the only reason any of us actually sign up for this stuff.

Ten emails every Monday is the part people miss, most send a batch once and quit when nobody answers. Your two or three sentence notes worked because they were short and easy to reply to, long emails just get deleted. After the first few weeks I'd change the subject line and lead with something specific about their company, that's what got my reply rate up.

Used to roll my eyes at people reusing passwords for throwaway stuff, figured everyone should just use a manager and be done with it. Then I sat down one night to actually sort my logins and realized I had like 200 accounts and half of them were things I signed up for once to read a recipe or track a package. My whole view flipped after that. Now I basically keep three tiers: stuff that matters (bank, email) gets its own strong one, shopping gets a middle tier, and junk sites get whatever. The sock site level stuff honestly does not deserve more effort than that. Trying to make 200 unique passwords is how people give up and go back to password123 everywhere, which is way worse than a little reuse on sites that hold nothing.