Change Email Address
March 6, 2019 4:26 PM Subscribe
Should I change my old email that is connected to hundreds of accounts and contacts and if so how?
I have an extremely old email address that I use for both business and personal. When I say old I'm talking like an aol type of address old. Though I'm not gonna be specific as to what the company is. I actually pay a small monthly fee to hold on to this email. Recently the company has had a few email issues which include email outages and a few cases where people emailed me and got bounce backs. It looks like I solved the bounce back issues which was from the company increasing their spam blocker and I just turned off my spam blocker. The outages happen maybe two or three times a year. There is always the possibility I could potentially lose business without my email working properly. Though I would imagine any email can occasionally have issues.
I've thought about changing my email due to it looking out of date and the problems discussed above. Thing is this email address is connected to tons of work clients. I know I could just send out a mass email to change it but people are really bad about updating their contact info. The bigger isssue is all the accounts I have connected with this email and how rough it would be to change all that. There are so many accounts that I don't even know if I would remember them all which could potentially result in some important things getting lost in the shuffle.
At the end of the day the email works fine about 95% of the time. Keeping that in mind, my question is should I change my email or is it ok to just stay with the old email? And if I were to change it is there an easy way to do this without hours of work? Any thoughts here are appreciated.
I have an extremely old email address that I use for both business and personal. When I say old I'm talking like an aol type of address old. Though I'm not gonna be specific as to what the company is. I actually pay a small monthly fee to hold on to this email. Recently the company has had a few email issues which include email outages and a few cases where people emailed me and got bounce backs. It looks like I solved the bounce back issues which was from the company increasing their spam blocker and I just turned off my spam blocker. The outages happen maybe two or three times a year. There is always the possibility I could potentially lose business without my email working properly. Though I would imagine any email can occasionally have issues.
I've thought about changing my email due to it looking out of date and the problems discussed above. Thing is this email address is connected to tons of work clients. I know I could just send out a mass email to change it but people are really bad about updating their contact info. The bigger isssue is all the accounts I have connected with this email and how rough it would be to change all that. There are so many accounts that I don't even know if I would remember them all which could potentially result in some important things getting lost in the shuffle.
At the end of the day the email works fine about 95% of the time. Keeping that in mind, my question is should I change my email or is it ok to just stay with the old email? And if I were to change it is there an easy way to do this without hours of work? Any thoughts here are appreciated.
I did essentially as phunniemee suggests, however I have no plans to ever close my old email address. That way someone who last emailed me ten years ago can always get me, but all current interaction is on the new account.
It's been a pretty well stress free way to go.
posted by deadwax at 6:53 PM on March 6, 2019 [1 favorite]
It's been a pretty well stress free way to go.
posted by deadwax at 6:53 PM on March 6, 2019 [1 favorite]
Hmm, have you checked if your email address has been compromised in a hack? HaveIBeenPwnd site is very helpful for that.
I used to use one account but then with the large number of data breaches (Equifax, etc) I decided enough was enough, and created 3 separate accounts with gmail. One for personal, one for important financial accounts, one for general / e-commerce / random stuff. (I have a separate account for work, so it's really 4 in total.)
It made it easier to figure out if I needed to change passwords and gave me peace of mind that my most important accounts would be harder for hackers to get into.
It's easy to toggle between each one, or else use the mobile app to view all emails together. I would go with phunniemee's suggestion and make the change now. You can probably still set up auto-forwarding so people who are lazy and forget to update can still email you.
posted by hampanda at 7:55 PM on March 6, 2019 [1 favorite]
I used to use one account but then with the large number of data breaches (Equifax, etc) I decided enough was enough, and created 3 separate accounts with gmail. One for personal, one for important financial accounts, one for general / e-commerce / random stuff. (I have a separate account for work, so it's really 4 in total.)
It made it easier to figure out if I needed to change passwords and gave me peace of mind that my most important accounts would be harder for hackers to get into.
It's easy to toggle between each one, or else use the mobile app to view all emails together. I would go with phunniemee's suggestion and make the change now. You can probably still set up auto-forwarding so people who are lazy and forget to update can still email you.
posted by hampanda at 7:55 PM on March 6, 2019 [1 favorite]
For accounts and such, you should get a password manager if you don't have one already:
* you can use stronger passwords with only having to remember them
* you don't have to remember which sites you have an account for
Given that you're going to have to relog into everything anyway, now is the right time to get one.
I used to use Lastpass, but they've had problems in the past, and they doubled their price two years ago, and announced a 50% increase in the near future, so I'm looking into alternative solutions.
I'm trying out Bitware, of which I've heard good things. It's free, and the premium tier is cheap, it's Open Source, and you can host the password vault yourself but you don't have too.
posted by snakeling at 1:56 AM on March 7, 2019
* you can use stronger passwords with only having to remember them
* you don't have to remember which sites you have an account for
Given that you're going to have to relog into everything anyway, now is the right time to get one.
I used to use Lastpass, but they've had problems in the past, and they doubled their price two years ago, and announced a 50% increase in the near future, so I'm looking into alternative solutions.
I'm trying out Bitware, of which I've heard good things. It's free, and the premium tier is cheap, it's Open Source, and you can host the password vault yourself but you don't have too.
posted by snakeling at 1:56 AM on March 7, 2019
Yes, I also use a password manager, 1Password, which has really great security features, including monitoring your emails and encrypted storage. It's $2.99/mo for individuals and $4.99/mo for families, and it's been well-worth it for me.
posted by hampanda at 12:01 PM on March 7, 2019
posted by hampanda at 12:01 PM on March 7, 2019
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Keep your old email address. Set up email forwarding from it to your new address today.
Every time you use an account linked to your old address, update it.
Every time someone emails you at your old address, reply from the new one saying hey make sure you update your contacts, my email address has changed!
You don't have to do everything all at once. The changeover can be a gradual process over many months. 6 months to a year from now, you will probably have had occasion to use and update everything you still need.
Then you can cancel the old account worry free.
posted by phunniemee at 4:55 PM on March 6, 2019 [21 favorites]