How do I change my email address?
Hi everyone, Leo Notenboom here. The question.
How do I change my email address?
Varies in its exact wording, but it's incredibly common.
The bottom line is that people have
an email address and now they want to switch to a new email address,
but they want to minimize the problems doing exactly that.
Unfortunately, while some services might make it easyish, most do not.
So let's be clear here.
Changing an email address conceptually means you've got something like
oldme@randomisp.com and you want to use now a new email address.
New me at somerandomservice.com. Everything about the email address is
different. The username before the at sign and the domain after the at sign.
Unfortunately, that means you're changing more than just your email address.
You are changing your email account.
Which that means, well, actually a very simple scenario.
It's just a pain in the butt.
Create a new account at your new provider.
So that means, in our example here we go
over to somerandomservice.com and set up a new account with a new email address.
Start telling all your friends to use your new email address.
Take the steps to go through and change
your email address at all of the subscriptions you might have.
All of the online stores you might have,
all of the newsletters you might subscribe to.
In most cases, you cannot just email them and say, Change my address.
You have to go through the process of for each one of those.
Changing your email address one at a time.
All of them.
Export your contact list from your old email account to your new one.
Start using your new email account.
Move any email saved from your old account to your new account.
Rarely is this easy.
There are a couple of different ways to do it.
The simplest conceptually is just
to forward all of those emails one at a time to your new account.
It's a bit of a pain.
The other approach is to set up a desktop email program that uses IMAP on your new
account and maybe IMAP on your old account.
Connect them both up, and then transfer on your desktop email
program your messages from one account, from a folder in.
One account to a folder in the
other account, at which point it will get
uploaded to the new account and you're ready to go.
The bottom line here is, though, is that's again, nontrivial piece of work
for anything you might want to save that you've got saved in your old account.
Watch your old email account. Keep looking.
I know that this isn't possible if you've lost access to it,
but there are going to be people that either don't get the message or
that you've overlooked and they're going to keep sending to your old email address.
You're going to have to remind them every
time, or you're going to have to say, oh, I forgot about that newsletter.
I'll have to go change my email address at that newsletter myself and carry on.
I would keep the old email address open as long as possible just to keep monitoring
for, like I said, people that didn't get the message.
But that's kind of what it boils down to.
Now, if you do this with an email program and I kind of alluded to this when I
talked about moving messages from one account to the other,
I won't say that it's any simpler, but it does make a couple of things interesting.
Again, create the account at the new provider.
In this case, configure your email program.
Like Thunderbird or Microsoft Outlook from Microsoft.
Office or the mail program in Windows or
any of a number of other desktop email programs.
Configure it to access your email at your new provider.
Configure it to access email at your old provider or whatever that might be.
Again, tell all of your friends to use the new email address.
Go out and change the email address at all
of the services and newsletters and so forth.
Watch the old email account.
But you can at least get all of your email,
be it the old account or the new account, in one place in your desktop email
program, and you can copy mail from one folder to another.
You can reply to your old email using your new email.
Those kinds of options become available once you're using a desktop email program.
Because you store all of your email and your contacts in your desktop email
program, you don't really have to worry about doing your contacts.
You don't have to really worry about moving much.
It's all there on your desktop.
It does make that part a little bit easier.
Now, the response that I often get is I don't want a whole new account.
I don't want to have to go through all of this stuff.
I've already downloaded my email.
Can't I just get a new email address that downloads in the same place?
Now, like I said, a new email address is a new email account.
It's how your account is identified
in most cases, even if you're with the same provider.
Email address number 1@gmail.com is
a completely separate account than email address number two@gmail.com.
Same for Outlook.com, same for @yahoo.com. It's all the same.
Each different email address implies a completely separate email account
that you have to set up by yourself to start changing your email address.
Now, there are things that can help.
For example, in the examples that I showed you above,
I was talking about continuing to access the old email account.
If you've got access, you can try forwarding automatically
forwarding messages from the old one to the new one.
This depends a lot on the email service that you happen to be using as your old
email service, but you can sometimes configure it to automatically forward
every incoming email to a different address.
That is one way to deal with this.
That way you can continue to pay attention
only to your new email address and still get everything that was sent to your old.
In that same vein, many email services your new email service
in this case can be configured so they kind of act like a desktop email program
in that you can configure them to go get the mail from a different account.
Using Pop3, that means that your new email account will periodically go out
and fetch anything that has arrived at your old email account.
The net effect to you is the same.
You see all of your old email in your new
email account, but it's a different way of getting it.
If your old email account doesn't forward
or you don't want to forward because it starts looking a little bit too much like
spam, then fetching using Pop3 is another option.
Not all email services provide this
feature, but it is a feature that you would need in your new email program.
The other thing that I want to talk about are what are called aliases.
Some email services will allow you to add what's called an alias.
Outlook.com is the only one that I
understand or have familiarity with doing this, but it basically allows you to do
something a little bit closer to what you're looking for and that is create
a new email address that is essentially the same account.
For example, my Hotmail account also has
an Outlook.com email address associated with it.
They show up in different folders within
the same account, but they're in the same account.
You are restricted to only using Microsoft provided email addresses for this feature.
And like I said right now I know of no other email
provider that does this, although I'm sure some of you will
probably point a few out that I didn't know about.
But the point is it's fairly restrictive.
You can't just get a random new email
address, it has to be from this specific provider or meet certain criteria.
The other question I get all the time is
what if I don't have access to the old email account?
Well honestly then you're kind of screwed.
So far, what I've talked about is.
An orderly process of moving from one email address to another.
What if it's not so orderly, right?
What if you lost access to an account and you're not going to get it back?
Well there's really not a whole lot you can do.
All you could really do is create your new
account, go tell all your friends, go change all your subscriptions or
subscribe anew if that's what needs to happen.
But if you don't have access to the old
account, you don't have access to the old account.
There's very little that can be done about that.
All you can really do is set up a new account and move forward with that.
Now I will say that there is what I
consider to be the ultimate answer and that is if you're thinking about
changing your email address, consider purchasing your own domain.
For example, I own askleo.com. I have
an email address leo@askleo.com. Any email address on that domain I can
create and I can use for whatever I want or assigned to different people.
Whatever.
But I actually access that email using Gmail.
If I ever lose access to my gmail account, great, I'll switch it and access
my Askleo.com email through a different domain, through a different service.
I could switch it to Outlook.com or.
Yahoo or any of a number of other things or I could do it myself.
The bottom line is that by owning your own domain and putting an email address
on your own domain, that email address is yours forever for as long as you choose
to own that domain, you can have it serviced by any number
of email providers over time without affecting what you have to tell people.
Changing the provider doesn't
at that point mean you have to change your email address.
It's something to consider because it does
make a lot of the hassle of running around and changing your email address and all
the online services that you've been using and all the newsletters that you subscribe
to, it makes it a lot easier because you just don't have to do that.
You just use your email address on your domain.
There is cost involved,
a little bit of complexity, not that much, but it's something to consider.
If this is an issue for you and if you're looking at changing your email address,
now is the perfect time to consider it as an option.
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I'm Leo Notenboom and this is Ask Leo.com. Thanks for watching.