Finally!
Seems that the Oracle Forums have finally come to their senses and allowed changing the watch/notification email address. Hurray for them! I have had the same email addy stuck in there since I signed up back in 2000. I haven't had access to the mailbox in 4 years by now.
So, now I can at least know if anything happens on a thread I have been watching. There have been several threads on this. The one I watched on the subject (and obviously never got any update on) is here The message count on that thread is up to 290 ...