How to Change Your Email Address - Comments Page 1

Category: Email




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Comment Page: 1 |  2 

Posted by:

KRS
08 Aug 2013

I want to keep my address the same (******@gmail.com) but change the name of the sender as seen by the recipient (From:xxx rather than From:yyy). Gmail seems to have every change available except this one.

Posted by:

Anita Lee
08 Aug 2013

Why not just get a second email address and keep the old one too? Easy enough to do and then you won't need to go through all the trouble of contacting anyone other than those you want to change.

Posted by:

Stuart Berg
08 Aug 2013

Bob,
My experience with switching to Gmail did not initially go well. It turns out that Gmail is quite fussy about what email forwarding it accepts. As you suggested, I just forwarded my old email online account to Gmail. About every day or so a forwarded email was rejected by Gmail and bounced back to my old email provider. I had no way of knowing it bounced back except by logging into my old email account, which was just an added pain. The solution was to use the Gmail capability of "pulling" the emails into Gmail from my old email account using POP3. It was much better because, should the "pull" fail for any reason (i.e. server down), it keeps trying every hour and never gives up. You set up "pulling" emails into Gmail by:
1. When you are in Gmail, click on the gear in the upper-right corner and then click on "Settings".
2. Click on the "Accounts" tab.
3. In the "Check mail from other accounts (using POP3)" section, click on the "Add a POP3 mail account you own" link.

Posted by:

Misterfish
08 Aug 2013

Why change an e-mail address? Easier to just start a new one, add it to your e-mail client and receive all your e-mails to either address. I've kept all my older e-mail addresses open, and still receive e-mails from people I've not heard from in years.

Makes more sense to keep an e-mail client and change e-mail adresses whenever you like.

By the way, remember to warn readers of the big bug in the Gmail spam filter - the one that shunts perfectly valid (and sometimes important) emails into spam - so you need to read the spam box regularly to ensure the good emails are not deleted (defeats the object of spam filters, right?). And yes, it's happened to me several times. And no, you cannot turn off their spam filters. And yes, gmail know about this.

Posted by:

Rick
08 Aug 2013

I use both Pegasus and Thunderbird to manage gmail and regular accounts. I would be interested in your take on that approach.

Posted by:

dinker rao
08 Aug 2013

have you heard of bigfoot.com? You can use this in parallel to what you say in you article.

Posted by:

Dale Cockle
08 Aug 2013

Very good article. Here are some additional points I'd like to add.

1. Be sure to use the BCC line (vs the TO and CC lines) when sending the change-of-address e-mails to avoid the security/privacy issues of broadcasting the contents of your address book to all recipients.

2. In the text of the change-of-address e-mail, be sure to include both the old address and the new address. This is helpful to help recipients find your entry in their address books to make the change.

3. Send the change-of-address e-mails from both your old account and your new account. This will increase the probability of all recipients receiving the notice (at the price of many recipients receiving the notice twice). The reason for this is to get around privacy measures your recipients may have in place, e.g., sending to trash any e-mail coming from someone not in the recipient's address book, or an intended recipient having blocked (accidently, I hope) your old e-mail address.

4. The option of forwarding from the old account to the new address is not available if/once the account associated with the old address is cancelled, e.g., change of ISPs).

Posted by:

Doc
08 Aug 2013

Yahoo's Customer Service might be a better reason to migrate to another service.

Posted by:

RandiO
08 Aug 2013

Thank you for this very relevant discussion thread.
I hope I am not going off on a tangent by the following, especially knowing that I cannot do the topic enough justice.
In this day and age of all the eavesdropping and privacy concerns, finding and picking the proper webmail service is truly a conundrum.
If such things (security/privacy) are a concern, then it must be said that alternatives to Gmail, HotMail (Outlook.com) and YahooMail are not going to be free of charge. Of course, the alternative would be to utilize email encryption (e.g. PGP, et al) or packaging email content in a passworded zipped file. Alternatively, one can select a payware email client that may provide more security/privacy. Yet, all of these alternatives extract more user time and effort.
One such payware secure webmail (out of Netherlands) is apparently going thru beta testing at the current time. It may be worthwhile for those who are concerned about security/privacy to review this offering from https://beta.startmail.com/
RandiO

Posted by:

Doc
08 Aug 2013

When Yahoo's Customer Service seems to have a default of keeping you on line for 5 minutes as they tell you how busy they are (THIS should have been the clue) then automatically hangs up on you, it's time to SERIOUSLY consider G-mail (even after 25+ years with Yahoo - paid or not, there's no difference in service - never was, isn't now, not looking promising)

Posted by:

Gary Scherer
08 Aug 2013

Moving or copying your mail from one mail service to another is easily done with an IMAP account/connection on the destination server and the source as another account/connection in Outlook or Thunderbird or other similar program. Just drag (or right-drag) the messages or folders from source to destination. Folders usually have to be done on at a time.

Posted by:

Daniel Wiener
08 Aug 2013

Over the years I've purchased an number of domain names, either for business reasons or just because I came up with an interesting name which I wanted to grab. They're pretty cheap with a domain registrar such as Godaddy. Then from Godaddy I set up email forwarding such that any email sent to me at that domain name will be forwarded to my Gmail account. (Make sure to include the catch-all forwarding feature so that
EVERYTHING sent to that domain gets forwarded.) Then on Gmail I set up the "FROM" field so that I can select any of my domain name addresses to send email from.

The result of all this is that I can give out different email addresses for different purposes (e.g., select which one will sound most impressive or appropriate to a particular recipient). It doesn't matter which address they have for me, since they all funnel back to my Gmail account.

This also makes me independent of my email provider. I love Gmail, but if a problem developed with it I could abandon it tomorrow for Hotmail or Yahoo or anybody else and not miss a beat, just by changing my email forwarding addresses at Godaddy. Also, if one of my email addresses gets on too many spam lists, I can shift to another address and either ignore the first one or shut it down altogether.

It also means that I can gradually shift from one address to another, and take my time updating subscriptions and financial institutions, etc., because the old one will still work. It's much easier to update an email address if you do so over a period of months, as you see emails come in from infrequent sources, rather than try to change everything at once and inevitably miss a few.

Posted by:

Stewart
09 Aug 2013

"...or move away from a desktop email program, to a more flexibile [sic] web-based email service like Gmail or Yahoo."

There is nothing more flexible than a desktop email program that can be used off-line - or when your umbilical cord to the net is broken.

Apart from that, when I have a problem with hotels, etc., which sometimes restrict email sending due to their security settings, I can also access my email through the web, either through my provider or by using MailtoWeb.com.

*****
I understand that email addresses are not re-issued. If I wish, I can still access my long dead AOL account.

Posted by:

Hira
09 Aug 2013

@ KRS
Gmail allows you to send email with different senders address.
https://support.google.com/mail/answer/22370?hl=en

~ Hira

Posted by:

MrToo
09 Aug 2013

Be careful of posting instructions how to change from your Yahoo e-mail address on a Yahoo forum. You may get banned or loose points.

Posted by:

salim
09 Aug 2013

thank you!
i needed this along with all the comments..

Posted by:

Therrito
11 Aug 2013

When changing from one web-based email account to another I believe it's a good idea not to close the old one right away.
There is always the possibility that someone you know (friends, family, a business, etc.) may not update their address book right away and may, for some time, continue to send mail to the old account.
This had happened to me when an Aunt continued to send mail to my old account even though I had informed her and several times afterwards for almost a year before she finally updated me in her contacts list.

Posted by:

Buffet
11 Aug 2013

For the life of me, I simply cannot imagine why anyone would EVER use their name in their e-mail address? How on earth could anyone be so stupid??

Posted by:

Michael
13 Aug 2013

I'm continualy amazed by the people you send the heads up email on address changes to. Many continue to keep sending email to your old address and then get bent out of shape when you don't respond to their 'URGENT' requests. I swear I've sent out 2 or 3 emails to these straglers and tell them in person I've changed my email address.

Can't lead some horses to water....

Posted by:

Robinoz
29 Aug 2013

I've been using Gmail for years and like the fact that I can send from different email addresses I own eg, my business address. It's a very good program.

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