Changing email addresses
Avron writes:
I had a thought about how best to get friends/family/colleagues to change the email address they use for you.
* Do you simply do a mass email from the new account to everyone (using the BCC field of course) so they can simply add the new address?
* Do you send from the old so it’s obvious that the new address is you?
* Do you merely start sending from the new one and hope people get the hint?
Avron,
You mostly seem to be asking about how to announce your change of address, and I think you’ve hit on most of the right points:
- Notify anyone who needs to know, using BCC so you don’t expose all the recipients to each other.
- Sending from the old address is probably better form; if anyone filters by whitelist, you’re more likely to get through.
I’d also add:
- Set your “Reply-To” header to the new address.
- Attach a vCard with your new contact details; many people’s mail clients will allow them to easily update their address books if you do that.
- Continue to accept mail at your old address — forwarding to your new address, if possible — for a reasonable time period. (What’s reasonable? I have no idea.)
One thing I often notice is that people frequently change address when they move jobs or ISPs. If you want to save yourself having to email all your friends and relations every time you sign up for a cheaper DSL plan or move to a new company, you’d best find an immovable, personal address. Ideally you’ll create your own domain, or perhaps one for your immediate family, so that you’re you@yourname.com or you@yourfamily.com.
If that’s beyond your reach, high quality, stable mail forwarding services like pobox.com or fastmail.fm, which cost a small annual fee, might serve your needs.
Free email accounts on services such as Hotmail or Yahoo don’t seem to be stable; I’ve known any number of people that have moved on from those services. Although GMail seems stable for now, it may not stay that way; I’m always wary of free email or web hosting accounts.
In short: never use your ISP’s provided email address, use your work email address only for work purposes, and have a separate personal address for general use. If/when you leave a job, contact any colleages you want to keep in touch with and let them know your personal address; it’s guaranteed to be easier than contacting Great Auntie Flo who’s a bit confused by this whole Internet thing, and needs to be hand-held through updating her address book.
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From experience, for fierce email hounds forwarding for about a year will fix up 99.9% of your correspondents.
If one likes GMail’s interface but doesn’t want to be wedded to an @gmail/@googlemail address, you can forward to it and set a custom email address on your outgoing mail and then your usage of GMail doesn’t show up in your choice of address and you can ditch it in due time: http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=20616
Mary: Yes, that’s exactly what I’m doing with my email at the moment. It works great, for the most part. (And the other parts are fiddly and off-topic so I’ll rant about them elsewhere.)
Many colleges and professional societies will allow you to keep an email account, possibly just as an alias. My college permits graduating students to keep their email address forever, and *my.realname*@acm.com forwards to my gmail account.
drobviousso: Yup, those can be handy. I guess I use my CPAN address that way, though admittedly only within the Perl community; regardless, cpanid@cpan.org is generally a good, immovable way to get in touch with Perl folks. I guess if you wanted, you could use it as your primary address.
Idea for a related column: etiquette decisions involved in choosing user ids, handles and domain names. I did have a go at this at one point at http://puzzling.org/computing/guides/domains/name
There’s probably a whole other column on *changing* handles too.
I’ve been using pobox.com since 1996, when I was changing providers and didn’t want to ever have to do the notification dance again. (Personal domains weren’t yet in vogue.) It’s well worth the $15/year to just not have to worry about it. Further, I can forward to multiple addresses, so now everything goes to gmail for searchability as well as to where I really read my email. (And hey, mirroring as mitigation against failure of the primary provider…) Sorry, I’ve gotten off the topic of etiquette.
Mary: something weird with your webserver there; you might want to look into it. I’ve got some thoughts on choosing/changing handles; we should talk about it sometime.
Monica: yeah, pobox was really the right solution back then, and I’d still say it’s a good one for people who might be daunted by figuring out domain registration and whatnot. Though hopefully that wouldn’t be anyone reading GE ;)
Skud: yeah, I intend to. A forced reload will load the page for you when it messes up like that.
You make some very good points about choosing the right email address. So many of us now rely on these address both for business and our continued social life!
I agree that using your ISP address is a bad choice as this ties you to your provider. My choice is to buy a domain name - about $9 the last time I looked for the year. But did you know that you don’t need buy an email account with the name to start using it straight away? Check out ‘How to Create a Business Email Address’ at Tetsou which explains in detail how to do this.
Tetsou
http://www.tetsou.co.uk
I’m surprised Fastmail.FM isn’t more widely known.
I had a look at it after following a link in someone’s email signature and set up an account. Free first, then member, now subscriber.
At first, I hardly used it; at one point, I forwarded my LiveJournal mail there (including comment notifications) while I was on a training course where we had web access, and since then, I’ve used it quite a bit and rather like it.
I especially like some parts of the interface I haven’t seen elsewhere, such as the keyboard navigation (e.g. delete-and-go-to-newer-message: Ctrl+Space, ‘d’, ‘,’ — something I can’t do in “one” step on Gmail, for example). Or even something simple as selecting a range of messages by clicking on one and shift-clicking on the last (GMX doesn’t do this, for example).
I think it deserves to be more widely-known, but when I hear about webmail, it’s nearly always only Hotmail/MSN, Yahoo, and Gmail.