Six steps for changing your email address
Jaron Brass is dumping his .Mac account 
, having been a loyal user since the iTools days.
It’s just not worth it, he says:
With rival free services providing gigabytes of e-mail storage for free, and companies offering Mac OS X SyncServices-compatible solutions for a one-time fee, there’s no reason to continue paying for the service.
As part of his address switch plan, he tells readers of his blog:
If you currently use my .Mac e-mail address to communicate with me, please take a few moments to update your address books. Send me an e-mail here and I can provide you my new addresses and vCard.
For one reason or another, everyone has to change email addresses at some point.
Nikolena at The Crafted Webmaster provides a neat checklist of six steps to make sure that the process goes smoothly.
She covers things like starting early, making a conscious list of all the places the address needs to be changed, announcing the new address and continuing to monitor the old one.
It’s all common sense, of course, but common sense often fails at the critical point. As Nikolena says,
A few weeks ago I decided to switch my personal email account from .Mac to Gmail. This would be about the third or fourth time since 1997 I’ve switched my personal email address. The first time I switched my email address was a huge pain in the butt. I had subscribed to a lot of newsletters and when I changed my email address, I lost about half of my subscriptions and missed a number of emails from friends and family. With each switch, I’ve gotten a lot better about going about it in an organized manner. If you need to change emails sometime in the future, learn from my mistakes by following these tips.
Similar Posts:
- Managing email aliases in Apple Mail
- Adding a name for every alias in Apple Mail
- Ipanema: Get your IP address emailed to you
- Mail.app and Address Book being stupid
- The Switch
Tags: changing email addresses, dotmac, Email in general, forward planning, mac, moving, not apple mail, not mail.app
February 6th, 2007 at 11:50 pm
What I’d recommend: don’t use a .Mac, Yahoo Mail Premium or similar fee-based email account as your main email address.
When you sign up for an email account, make sure you can set it up to forward all incoming email to a different account. Or better yet, use an email address on your own domain name – that way, you can change providers without needing to change your email address (simply transfer the domain name).
Of course, all of this only helps if you do all of the above in advance.
February 7th, 2007 at 2:16 am
I agree, having your own domain name is the “number portability” of the internet. I got my own domain nearly a decade ago. Haven’t had to change my address since.
It’s allowed me the flexibility to switch ISPs, and hosting providers. It’s allowed me to use special use e-mail addresses with the domain for help in filtering marketing mail, spam, etc. (in that way it’s almost like having your own area code, not just your own phone number)
February 7th, 2007 at 3:11 am
I’ve had similar thoughts about .mac recently, but I’m working under the assumption that Apple knows that the service is overdue for a refresh. What would be the optimal time to roll out new features in .Mac? I’m thinking that would be in a few months when they release the latest version of the operating system. We’ll see – in the meantime my .mac subscription doesn’t expire until September, so I can hang in there.
February 7th, 2007 at 11:44 am
Your own domain name is the best way to go, in my opinion. You have control over your username and you don’t need anyone’s permission to change it. And it can be pretty cheap if you use Google Apps For Domains, like I do.
February 7th, 2007 at 1:11 pm
Or you could just get your own domain and never have to change your e-mail address. Flexibility matters.
February 7th, 2007 at 7:19 pm
Buy a pobox.com account and redirect at will. I have had the same public-facing account for 8 years but can redirect at will (currently gmail).
February 7th, 2007 at 10:00 pm
As a luddite who fixed the “own a URL scenario just for email consistency” a decade ago I am amazed that computer wiz’s and power users can get into this situation! mmm perhaps i am a geek in the making?
February 8th, 2007 at 9:10 am
It looks like someone beat me to the punch, but I recommend people get their own domain, even if they use it to forward to a “real” email address.
I got my first domain during the “dot-bomb” era. I was still on dial-up at the time and would discover my ISP no longer existed and I had no notice whatsoever. Since then I use broadband and real mail hosting for my domain. It’s doubly nice because I have an authenticated SMTP server, so I can take my laptop anywhere and send email.
The technically challenged may want to get a Yahoo!, GMail, Hotmail, etc. account. I’ve had my Yahoo! account for over 10 years now and I doubt they’re going anywhere.
September 13th, 2008 at 5:02 am
If you’re switching from one free email provider to another, setting up email forwarding is a life-saver.
Also, an easy way to start building the list of places to update your address is to do a search for “confirm” or “account” (etc…) and find all those old confirmation emails (especially useful on gmail, since you save most everything, hypothetically)