Why are you changing your email address? (as opposed to adding a new address)
Changing email addresses is a little like moving home and carries many of the same issues of advising authorities and potentially losing contact with people. It is not something to do on a whim
Bear in mind that you cannot effectively hide your email address it will get out there. It is much the same as you cannot hide a “real” address but has the disadvantage is that it costs money/time/effort to contact you via mail, phone or whatever, junkmailing is more or less free
There are many reasons you might want a new email address and to eventually discard the existing one, it may simply be that you have outgrown your old moniker, or that it has become an embarrassment in some way. It may be due to a change in the services you use on the internet or a change of job/organisation
A business email addresses we believe should always be linked to your business and website, it’s a basic bit of PR and professional image projection. We provide all our clients with free emails associated with their business
For a personal email, whilst we and many others provide these, your best choice may be to use one of the big “free” providers, Gmail, Hotmail, Outlook, Apple Mail.com etc as you can take these with you as your circumstances change, and they are likely to remain in operation for years to come, (albeit nothing is forever, remember Freeserve, AOL and Yahoo?) Do note though “there is no such thing as a free lunch”, and these providers will all to a greater or lesser extent use anything they can glean about you to pass on to their cronies for what they might term “personalised advertising” – they really mean infringing your privacy
There are some very good reasons why you may want to do this, and some less good ones:
Good Reasons for changing your email
- You are leaving an expensive mail hosting service (Say as an ex BT Internet customer)
- You are obliged to by a change of supplier, (say you’re using your “free” ISP providers email service and are changing supplier)
Bad Reasons for changing your email
- Because your existing email address has “been published”, known to too many people etc
- You are receiving too much junk mail / spam (your new email overtime will and depending to a great extent on your browsing habits and preferences become widely known and gather the same detritus, you are better asking your supplier about anti-spam systems available)
- Your email account has been hacked – you simply need to reclaim it and ensure a secure password etc is setup
Next Steps
Send an email to everyone in your address book, saying that you have changed your email address and can they amend their contact records NOW
(Link to How to email a group of contacts correctly)
If you are trying to “Lose” junk mail / spam you DO NOT NEED TO ADVISE SUCH CONTACTS, miss them off!
Then create a vacation notice on the old email address, saying that your email address has changed and this mail address will be ceased imminently
This is not a good idea if you want to lose spammers etc, you need to create an email template instead of a vacation notice and manually send this to anyone who does not change to your new address.
Forwarding or re-direction?
Forwarding email leaves a copy of the email in your old inbox whilst putting a duplicate in your new email box, using twice the storage space and clutter. However it does make it obvious who is still emailing the old address so you can chase them if you wish to
Re-directing simply sends the email to the new mailbox, removing duplication and clutter but making the fact that it is directed to the old address much less obvious
The End: At some point down the road it is good practice to close the old email permanently and potentially leave that address to some future user.