[HOWTO] Change Your Email Address (or not) - Comments Page 1

I read some time ago that major ISPs were required to keep your email account on their site open even if you quit using their service. I don't know who would enforce this if it is actually true. ATT actually services their email through Yahoo so it is likely that you can keep your ATT email even if you leave them but I would be curious to know about general policies in this regard.

It is very inexpensive to create your own domain and use it for your email address. For example, register the domain name Rankin.com and set up your email address as Bob@Rankin.com (not my real name!). You can always forward that address to a Gmail or other account as you describe, but you never have to change your published email address again.

Only once did I have to change my email address - That was back in 1998, when I went from an AOL email address to a bellsouth address. I have kept my email name of mmemoxie or memoxie throughout my email history.

I started using MmeMoxie as a name back in 1997, 21 years ago. csk has me beat for more years and has done the same thing. I do have a Gmail account and should I ever need to change my main provider, I will use the Gmail account.

I don't need to worry about notifying anybody, since, hardly anyone of my friends use email anymore. But I will have to update my important newsletters, like Ask Bob Rankin and so on. I will also need to update several websites that I use on a daily or monthly basis.

I bet that csk has the same financial institute for as many years, too. I know that we have had the same financial institution since we moved to Georgia and that was 33 years ago. When you find what you want and to you it is good, you plan on making sure you do keep them. }:O)

I have gone through the process of "closing" out yahoo mail, switching to gmail. I was tired of all the security issues. I have an auto message stating to please use my gmail account and notified people individual with the address. I do not have the address on the auto-response message. It flags auto responses from sites replying and it is easy to eliminate junk mail.

After 2 months I think I have covered all of the odd miscellaneous things I've subscribed to over the years that I want. I unsubscribed or update any I want to keep.

However, some links only contain unsubscribe as an option, which is frustrating. The Federal sites such as the FDA is one example and since I have several of these, it is a hassle to find and change, easier to unsubscribe and redo. This also helped me to eliminate emails I was still receiving but no longer really had much interest in.

I was reluctant to change since I had the account from the early 90's (TourBus days😉) and used it to filter to my computer account that did change due to changing providers. As a side note, I loved eliminating so much junk mail that has come in to the Yahoo account. I get a small amount of junk on gmail, due to limiting what things I sign up for. I have an Apple account that is only used for family that has never received any at all (they are mostly computer savvy and do not forward to multiple showing addresses).

I highly recommend having a "cover" account, tho I have done it in a different way. I plan to keep the virtually empty Yahoo account for at least a year before ignoring it totally after reading your earlier article. Nothing outside (Pintrest, FBook) and such links to any of my accounts now. Thank you for your informative articles!

I too am concerned that some companies require a verifiable email address as a user name, especially financial entities like PayPal.

I use an email provider that allows throwaway addresses.

On a regular basis, I not only change the password on these accounts, but I make a new throwaway email address. Once the new address has been verified and accepted, the old one can be deleted from my email account, as it has only been used for this one entity.

Colleges sometimes allow alumni to use their email systems as "re-director" (bent-pipe) systems -- mail comes to the college address and is immediately bounced to whatever actual address you're using at the moment. Hence johnsmith@alumni.oldivy.edu. With this setup, I never need to tell anyone (except the school) my current actual email address...

When changing your email, consider updating your email at all the companies you use. (Remember, when you hit "forgot password" they will be sending an email to the address you originally used with them.)

Leo agrees with NB's comment - consider your own domain:
https://askleo.com/get-email-address-life/

I also second NB's comment. I own several domains for various reasons, so that email addressed to my-name @ my-domain-name gets email-forwarded to my Gmail account (and also my old Yahoo account, before I learned about its security issues). Email sent from my Gmail account is set to use one of my domain name addresses as the default "From" address. If I ever wanted to switch from Gmail to some other service, no one would even know. Conversely, I can use any of my domain name email addresses interchangeably, with everything funneled through my Gmail account, thus simplifying things on my end. I can also stop using a particular address with no negative consequences.

For further redundancy I use MailStore Home on almost a daily basis to back up all of my email in my Gmail account to my computer's hard drive. And I signed up with iDrive in response to Bob Rankin's many nudges, so my backed-up email then gets backed up onto iDrive's cloud storage.

Not that I'm paranoid, but I just wish there was an easy way to add further redundancy...

MailStore Home is recommended again in Comments to today's article on "changing email address, or not".

A search of your site only finds mentions of MailStore in the Comments sections of your articles.

Bob, do you recommend MailStore Home to your readers?

I have a MacBook Pro and this spring we plan on moving to an area that has a different ISP. As you can see, there are likely very small group that would the same ISP that I have right now.
The question I have is, will my contacts stay in my contact listing or should I copy the people that are there before the move?

I, along with a few others, started the AOL career forum back in 1971 time frame and since been involved with numerous chatrooms in different subject areas (actually was credited with starting the Accounting forum, recruited others, ran it and developed different sub-chatrooms within it). Those were the days, but I never left AOL.

A simple way to avoid having to change your email address is by using an email forwarder account as your email address. I use "pobox", but there are others. I change ISPs as soon as they cause me heartburn, and only have to notify pobox.com of my new email address for forwarding purposes.

Just use your permanent (forwarder) email address in the "reply to" of your email client program template.

I don't understand why so much confusion and why such widespread dependency on ISPs as to what email address to use.

OK, so my addy here is a Hotmail one from 2000 (what's the odds?) that is my junk addy - sorry Bob :-(

What I don't understand is why not avoid all the hassle and just register one's own domain.

For example, my main addy is myname at mynamemyname dot (and the usual)

Also I have registered a somewhat lofty domain myname at mba76, also at iveymba76

Finally - to balance the loftiness of the previous, I also registered pumpum.ca (which is used with myname at, preceding it)

So what am I missing in this simple, e-mail-for-life-time solution?

Cheers,
casey

I would like to see some discussion on eliminating junk email. I have had this account for several years and get way too much unwanted mail. Unsubscribe just doesn't get it done.

Phillip

It is my opinion that the absolute worst thing you can do to stop junk mail is to "unsubscribe".

You are just letting the spammer know they have a good address, and they will pass it on and you'll get even more spam.

The best way, IMO is to mark it as "spam" or "Junk" whichever term your ISP uses. Never even open it.

And just ignore it.

I'm one of the mail forwarders. I use mail.com and selected one of their domains and haven't looked back since sometime in the mid 90's.

I also keep all of my email local on my desktop and backed up.

Have never had an issue moving all archived and current email when I move to a new machine.

Do it once. Do it now. Never have to do it again.

I have used the premium version of Yahoo mail (their original email was far and away the best) since 1998. About 7 or 8 years ago, I changed email names there and found a program, it cost around $5 that moved all my contacts, folders and everything else from the old account to the new one. It ran overnight but absolutely everything moved perfectly and I have hundreds of folders with thousands of emails.

Even with the increase coming with Verizon next year, I see no reason to move to the evil empire - though I do keep a throwaway address there. I do also have three domain names I keep but don't use the email associated with them though I could.

Years ago I registered a domain on GoDaddy. They allow 5 users for the same fee so my husband and I both have it. We then use SpamArrest to screen the mail. If I changed ISP or Gmail I just need to change it on SpamARrest and it's all forwarded properly to my Outlook account. Works like a charm and I'm not tied to any particular service. Never could understand why anyone would want a .ATT or .Frontier, etc.

Yes Linda, that was an awesome deal that GoDaddy had - but very sadly, recently they stopped giving out even one e-mail addy with a registered domain.

Cheers,
casey