Fully Migrate or Change Your Email Address

Posted on February 21, 2012 at 5:47 am

Your email address is your primary source for of course sending and receiving emails, but also the main point for many other web services that you may use also. You use your email address to sign up for pretty much all service based websites. In doing so, your email quickly becomes linked to many other accounts also, including your Facebook, YouTube, and even online banking account.

GMAIL

When you decide that you’d like to change your email address (use a new email address), it can become quite a pain, simply because your existing email is linked to everything you do online. To switch to a new email address fully and completely, you will likely want to do several things:

Set up a forwarding service

There are several email forwarding services available, some dependent on the particular webmail provider. For example, here is Google’s forwarding directions. Most of the time, it is best to use the directions provided by your particular email provider. However, if you don’t use a major webmail service, or if your particular email service doesn’t offer forwarding instructions, there are several companies such as True Switch that specialize in email forwarding.

Popular Email Providers

What it does:

Email forwarding basically monitors your old email address and pushes any existing, incoming emails to your new email address. Most of the time, forwarding is setup for a limited time period, such as 30 days. In the 30 days, you can save important or preferable emails from your contacts, and use the forwarding as a gateway to notify your contacts that you have gotten a new email address… all from your new email address.

AOL Mail

Update your contacts – the easy way

Many forwarding services also offer helpful things like automatic contact importing that you can use to make the switch as painless as possible. For example, you could auto import all of your contacts to your new email address, then compose a FWD: Hey I got a new email address message, to all of your contacts with one email.

Contacts GMail

Update your Email Address for your online profiles and accounts

This step is time consuming, but it is likely something that you will want to do. As mentioned above, your email address is linked to the services you use, so it could be linked to your Facebook, online bank account, and any other profiles that you have created online.

There isn’t an all-in-one service that can just update your new email to all of the websites that you use, so this step is all manual.

Tips:

Using email forwarding, track and monitor your incoming emails for any incoming messages from the websites that you use. For example, if you get a notification that “John Doe” has added you as a friend on Facebook, then let this be a reminder that your Facebook account needs to be updated with your new email; or, if you get an email from Walmart telling you that they are having a sale this weekend, this may remind you that you have a Walmart.com account that is linked to your old email address, and it too needs to be updated.

It is wise to keep your old email address active and forwarded for a while, if you have several online accounts. That way, you can assure that all online services that you use are updated with your new email.

Finishing up

Once you feel that you have updated all of your online accounts, or at least the ones that you use, you will have successfully migrated and changed to a new email address. From here, proceed to delete your old email address, turn off forwarding, etc…

Overall, migrating or changing email addresses is not fun, but using the above guide, you can assure that you take all of the steps necessary to fully move to a new email account. If anyone has any other tips regarding email changes, feel free to leave a comment to help others.

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