Out of date email address?

I don’t have most of the information you tried to use. All they would have to do is undo the authentication for one day to give us an opportunity to get those towns up to snuff. The big boys always give you a warning that they are changing their policies, because they know not everyone is completely in compliance. And they really hate the negative comments they know they will get.

Sorry to hear about that @TheRealTiminator . It's craziness.

Perhaps given the number of affected players EA should consider a temporary simplified account recovery option on your account log-in.
I'd suggest it asks you to provide your dead email and password like the regular log in along with your Origin ID ( it's your game / screen name - I know one player wasn't sure ) and the game level.
Once that's confirmed you can add a new email and that gets sent a verification code, but to prevent abuse it can only be used once per game, it takes 24 hours to implement the change and it sends an email alert to the original registered email giving the opportunity to block it if it was a hack attempt.
I think that should be easy enough to implement and secure enough, especially if that email alert will reset the account and roll back any game changes even if it isn't seen straight away.
Go on EA, let people play the game !!

*UPDATE *

I've just got off the phone with EA help (that's an oxymoron if ever I heard one), since they had removed the option of live chat from my account I was forced to use their premium rate (in the UK at least) phone line in a last desperate attempt to change my email address.

I went through the same personal details as before, gave them dates of game purchases on PSN, I tried to offer dates of in-game purchases for TSTO which the operator said weren't sufficient, they had to be actual game purchases. And the final result was that "the information you have provided is either insufficient or inaccurate to verify your account".
I explained to him that this was now my 4th attempt and that I'd given him more information about myself than they had ever known, so if this was insufficient there was no way to recover the account and could he therefore close the account. This he refused on the grounds that he could not verify my identity, I suggested that he close the account on security grounds then as I was currently logged in to it on my account.ea.com and therefore if I was not the account owner then it must have been hacked.
This was predictably met with the same intransigence as before, so I thanked him for his assistance and hung up before I said something I'd regret.

The upshot of all this is that it seems my time as an active TSTO player are now at an end, it's been a good run & I have no regrets, the money I've paid into the game over the years have given me 8 1/2 years of fun & frustration. Along the way I've acquired 50+ friends in-game and enjoyed some laughs & banter on here and Tapped Out Topix previously.

I can't get into my game at all, so if anyone out there is in my friends list, then thanks for your support, and any & every body who I've ever interacted with on here, to quote the great Douglas Adams.......

"So long, and thanks for all the fish".

??

@TheRealTiminator ??

Sniff ????

@TheRealTiminator I'm so sorry to hear this

@TheRealTiminator Aww wow, that is not good at all☹️.

@TheRealTiminator I'm really sorry to hear that. It's almost an impossible list to complete. I would be so aggrieved to be in your position.

That UK phone number is an insult too.
It costs less for me to ring America or Australia than EA UK !?!

So many companies are worried about the appearance of being insecure, so they're racing to add "security" protections to their accounts. In this case, EA has totally screwed up the implementation. Why can't they just leave it alone!