Btw, why is it considered normal? I think it would be much better to mention an e-mail, to which you will have (more-or-less) permament access.
I place the blame here entirely on Google for misusing forms of identification. Two-factor authentication is having two locks on the same door, where recovery addresses are having two doors with separate locks. Using a recovery address for 2FA is absurd, and caused me to be locked out of my permanent email address.
When Google switched from offering 2FA to requiring 2FA, it would have been acceptable for them to require a second form of authentication to be added on the next log-in. It is not acceptable for Google to pretend that they have a second form of authentication when they do not.
Second, up until the moment it was needed, I had access to my recovery address. Google locked me out of my primary address and my recovery address simultaneously.
What leads you to believe it isn't normal? I mean, do you have an eternal email address? Have you ever switched jobs?
Most papers are authored/co-authored by graduate students. Do you think all of them will hold onto their institutional address after they graduate? A big chunk of them will not even continue in the field.
Dumb example: you might have published a paper while working at a company, but years later the company went bankrupt and ceased to operate. Now somebody else is owning the domains and they will not make you the favour to give you an email address.
Notable example: Sun Microsystems. But there are many more, of course.
Or you just moved from one university to another. Or you published while on grad school and then moved somewhere else.
This would be a security nightmare for them. It is pretty normal for universities to have some sort of identity managmemt system that automatically provisions emails when you are employed there and deprovision them once you are gone.
Most universities use a portal of some sort for easy access to personal information and preferences anyway, so it shouldn't be too difficult to limit access for alumni to only allow them to change a few personal details like name / address / phone number and the like, plus email forwarding settings. I think the extra cost is negligible compared to what universities already spend on alumni like newsletters, conferences, dinners, etc.
If you forward emails automatically then you'd lose this accreditation. I suppose the solution would be an accreditatiom domain that forwards to your uni address only, but that's extra work now.
Additionally, making people who want to cold email work a little to acquire the current email address is actually a good thing, especially if they want to talk about something years old. I’ve generally had a lot more pleasant and engaging correspondence with people who worked out my email (say from a side project I develop pseudonymously) than ones who directly lifted my email from my professional profiles. So, expiring emails in papers generally isn’t a real problem anyway, and it’s basically never a hurdle if your target is still in academic circles. It only becomes a problem in this specific context of automated authentication (based on something not intended for that purpose).
Obviously our university isn't gonna make a 10k€/month contract just because some prof wants their mail forwarded to gmail. Especially not if they are not working here anymore.
Should I have waited until the startup had more revenue? We were profitable at the time (we were B2B and the layoffs did us in)