4000009: Considerations for changing your email address

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AKB 4000009: Considerations for changing your email address

by @jknauth

Published June 26, 2019 | rev 1.0

(See the original here, especially if you want to print it.)

HAVE A PLAN.    KEEP GOOD RECORDS.    START EARLY.    DON’T RUSH!

Changing your main email address can be a time-consuming and frustrating process, but may be necessary. For example, it might be required if you switch to a different network. Below is some of what I encountered when I finally changed my address. Hopefully this may help you avoid some surprises.

Probably you will have many organizations (companies, government departments, institutions, charities, etc.) as well as many people to notify about the change. Just figuring out whom to notify and how to do it can be a big chore.

Then when you try to update the email address in your accounts on the various organizations’ websites, you will probably find that many of the requested updates don’t work. Almost a quarter of the well over 100 organizations I notified did not handle it well, if at all. (Updating personal correspondents is a lot easier.) You may think you have successfully made the change thru an organization’s website and then find they are still using your old address, maybe months later. The organization didn’t change its records everywhere it should have when you told them to update the address. Some don’t even provide a way for you to request a change. For a login ID, some use the original email address you entered at account-setup; however they don’t provide a way to change the login ID if you later change your email address. Some may refuse to accept the format of your new email address. Some even provide links to obsolete or non-existent “profile” web pages. You just have to keep bugging the appropriate Support people (hopefully you can reach them) until they fix their problems or give you a workaround.

Getting completely switched over to the new address can take months. Don’t wait until the last moment to start the change process, i.e., don’t wait until just a few days before your old email address will stop working. You don’t want important emails being sent into a black hole because the sender hasn’t yet switched to the new address. Note that some websites require that you still have access to the old email address to authorize the change to a new email address. Presumably for a long time you will need the ability to send/receive with both the old and new email addresses.

With so much going on, it can be very helpful to keep a log of all the requested changes, as well as when and how you made them. Record any problems you had and how you resolved them or are trying to resolve them.

PLANNING AND NOTIFICATION STAGES

To help me see how much work might lie ahead, a few weeks before starting notifications about the email address change I did a lot of prep work. I went thru all the websites I would need to notify about the change and made a list of what was required to do a “profile” update for each. I did no notifications yet; in fact at this point I still did not have a fully tested new address. Finding out how to do the update at a website sometimes required a good deal of exploration since the update process was not always obvious. Having this how-to list made things much easier when I did the actual website updates weeks later.

Similarly in this pre-notify period, I went thru all my email address books, trimming them down and using Thunderbird’s flagging and sorting facilities to group those people I would later notify. This made the later notifications pretty easy to do. Also during this time I did text searches on my PCs to find miscellaneous files that had my current email address and might need to be updated. That meant I could very quickly switch to updated files when my notifications began.

In summary, I separated a lot of the work into a pre-notify planning stage to get a feel for what I was about to get into (and maybe to decide not to do the change at all if there was some showstopper). Of key importance, I could do all this planning work well before I had even settled on a specific new email address. Having already done so much work in the planning stage also meant that during the later notification stage I could concentrate mainly on solving problems, which I knew would arise. The work done during the planning stage made the notification stage easier to do. This split into planning and notification stages worked out very well in my case.

WHY I CHOSE MY NEW EMAIL ADDRESS

I have had my own website for a long time. It comes with an email capability provided by the website hosting company. I had not used that facility much until I recently decided to change my email address to an address independent of my internet access provider (currently Spectrum). After some thought and testing, I decided to use my website’s facility to provide my new email address. That meant my PC-based (POP3) email processing was essentially unchanged from what I was used to with my current email address. I preferred an address provided by my website vs. one supplied by something like Gmail because I wanted to have my mail logs on my PC, enabling my own backups and specialized searches. However, for many other people, using something like Gmail (with IMAP) may be a better choice.

In the testing of my new email address, I did find one problem; it was associated with email attachments. I reported the problem and the web hosting company fixed it in less than two hours. Other than that, the new email address has worked very well. *BY FAR* the main problems I have had are not with the working of the new address, but have been with getting some organizations to accept it and use it instead of the old address. Many of the problems I encountered are described below.

Get and Test a New Email Address

Your access-provider Internet Service Provider is the organization that gives you a physical connection to the internet, e.g., Spectrum, AT&T, Comcast, CenturyLink, and Ting. Here I will use ISP to mean access-provider Internet Server Provider. Many such ISPs also provide email services, such as giving you an email address.

Is your current email address provided by your current ISP, e.g., samjones@nc.rr.com from Spectrum? If so, changing ISPs, e.g., to switch networks, very probably means losing that email address.

Some considerations when getting a new email address:

• Choose an email address which is independent of your (new) ISP.

Otherwise you’ll lose the new address if you change ISPs again.

• Paid or free? Security? Support? Easy to type and remember?
• Location of your mail logs? (pros and cons are not covered here)

Using POP3 protocols: Mail logs are on your PC.

Using IMAP protocols: Mail logs are in the cloud.

• Which of your devices will need to use the new address?

Set up and test your prospective new email address and email system.

• Try all the things you can do currently:

Send/receive messages, large/small, attachments, CC/BCC, address lists, etc.

Test on your PCs, using local email programs (e.g., Thunderbird) or browsers, as appropriate.

Test on your phones, tablets, etc.

Don’t forget some less obvious gear you may have set to email you alerts:

• Alarms, refrigerators Internet of Things, etc.

If relevant, test at the cloud site providing the new email address.

If you reached this point successfully, you should now have a good new email address to change to. Of course you don’t want to start asking others to switch to the new address until you are sure it is good. Then the following three major areas must be dealt with; each has some problems.

Have Organizations Switch to Your New Email Address

• To update the email address to be used for you by an organization, you first must “login”.
  • The organization website’s “login”/”signin” link may be hard to find.
  • You may have forgotten your login ID and/or password and must do some sort of reset.
• The website’s “profile” updating process may be difficult to use.
  • Non-obvious link to your “profile” after login:

    – E.g., buried among many other links at the bottom of the page or in some (possible hidden) sidebar/dropdown.

  • Inconsistent terminology used by websites:

    – “Profile”, “settings”, “preferences”, “personal information”, “general information”, “user information”, “manage account”, etc., as well as some icons without identifying text. Hopefully your email address is within one of these.

  • Inconsistent website verification of the new email address:

    – Some request reentry of a password; some send an email to the new email address and require you to click a link in it; some send a security code text message to your phone; some do nothing.

  • The update process may simply fail (poorly implemented — see below).
• Some websites had bugs that popped up when I tried to do the update:
  • Didn’t recognize a valid email address format, e.g., “name” in the jgkhome.name part of the email address. The “name” Top Level Domain (TLD) has been valid since 2002.

    – The following organizations apparently had this TLD “name” recognition problem. In two it occurred in two different divisions of the same organization, each with its own unique procedure; these required multiple fixes by two separate Support groups and I had to deal with each separately:

    ===>  Red Cross (2: donate blood, donate cash), Humana (2: drugs, dental), National Geographic (1: newsletter)

  • Provided a “profile update” link to a no-longer-existent web page.

    ===>  Dell (problem quickly fixed)

  • Have the email address spread around in multiple places, not all accessible/known to the user. If the “profile” update you make does not change them all, the old address may still be used for some emails they send you, or be used for verification checks, or be used for something else.

    ===>  IBM Matching Grants left my employee serial number tied to my old email address. Verification checks then failed, preventing any request for a matching grant for a charity. The problem was subsequently fixed.

    ===>  MANY MORE organizations exhibited (and continue to exhibit) the scattered address problem! It will probably take a long time for all this dust to settle. Eventually some unimportant emails, e.g., ads and charity solicitations, may get lost (still sent to my old, finally non-operational address). Hopefully no organizations have created long-delay, email address time bombs for important communications. Organizations need to do a far better job in this area. A user should be able to update an email address easily, securely, and reliably at an organization, and have the update propagated everywhere required within a reasonable time.

  • To resolve such bugs you must contact the website’s Support.

    – Hopefully they will make a good fix so others won’t hit the same bugs. Or they may just do a one-off, ad hoc workaround for you and the next person(s) will encounter the original problems.

• There are possible problems if the old email address is used as your login ID. Processing varies.
  • Some sites update the login ID to the new email address when you update the address.
  • Others require a separate update for the login ID; hopefully they make this process clear.
  • Others don’t allow any login ID update at all.

    – Then you’re stuck with having an old email address as your ID.

    – What happens if the website later tries to send to the old (by-then-deleted) email address?

  • Sometimes the website’s Support people can do a manual update if nothing else works.
  • If possible, it would probably be a good idea to no longer use an email address as a login ID.
• It can take a while for each requested change to take effect.
  • • In the meantime they may still send you emails to the old address.

  – I learned that some mailing list blasts are frozen (with the then-current email addresses) as much as six weeks before being sent, perhaps by some hired emailer company.

  • Some organizations, e.g., utilities, may take a month before sending to you again.

    – You may not know until then how well the sender has really handled your requested update.

• Updates for newsletters, charity mailings, ads, etc. received by email.
  • Probably you are on many mailing lists, some undesired. If any (likely many) are not automatically handled by all the above website notifications you did for the email address change, you can now do a mailing list triage:

    – Try to notify those lists you want to stay on (assuming they provide a way to do this).

    – Try to unsubscribe from those you want to drop (assuming they provide a way to do this).

    – Let the rest eventually fall into the black hole of your old (to-be-deleted) email address.

  • Sometimes the received emails contains links to update your email address or to unsubscribe.

    – These may not work. See above for some possible failures by the sender’s website.

  • You may need to “unsubscribe” under the old address, then resubscribe under the new one.
  • Often for charities you can do the update by returning one of the frequent hardcopy mailings they send you via USPS. The return forms usually have an email address field. They’ll probably pay more attention if you include a donation.

Have Your Personal Correspondents Switch to Your New Email Address

• Examine and clean up your address books.
  • Probably they have accumulated a lot of clutter over the years.
  • Sort thru the entries to decide which correspondents to notify.
  • Maybe you should now delete many of the little-used entries.
• Decide how to notify the desired correspondents.
  • Individually, or by small groups, or by a mass mailing.

    – Caution: Some mail servers restrict the size of mass mailings.

  • To lessen the chance of being “spam filtered” by the receiver, it may be better to send the “My new email address is …” notifications from your old email address rather than the new one.

    – Presumably your old address is known by the receiver and considered good.

    – Sending from the old address also means the received notification message may explicitly show your name as the sender in the receiver’s inbox — thus more likely to be read.

• Do the notifications and monitor who has paid attention. Hopefully many people will respond and acknowledge the change.

Handle Everything Else Where Your Old Email Address Might Appear

• Find and update device files which contain the old email address:

  – Letter templates, website source files, shortcut keys, etc.

  – These may be on PCs, tablets, smartphones, and similar devices.

• Update “hardcopy” items that have the old email address:

  – Business cards, letterheads, brochures, answering machine announcements, billboards, truck signs, airplane banners, tee shirts, tattoos, etc. — you will find that email addresses are ubiquitous, particularly if yours has now become obsolete.

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[VulturEMaN]

I’ll discuss this a bit differently, having done tons of migrations while working at a MSP. My perspective is going to be migrating from the most common setups to gmail for all Windows PC scenarios. This doesn’t cover business situations that should involve your company’s IT department, like trying to do anything with OST files (do a proper export or use OST2 in a true emergency), or migrating to GSuite Business (just use gsuite sync!).

Index:

• Section 1 – local app users only – pitfalls I’ve encountered
• Section 2 – creating a gmail account and preparing for migration to a new account
• Section 3 – steps if you want to just do a straight web-based email to web-based email migration (if you only ever used the web-based email access before, or if you previously used IMAP, or if you don’t mind migrating whatever email exists in your provider’s POP3 mailbox).
• Section 4 – Prepare for the number of website accounts you’re going to have to change

Section 1: Local App Users Only: This section applies to users that only use local mail apps on their computer, like Outlook, Thunderbird, Windows 10 Mail, or Windows Live Mail.
If you only use email in the web browser, skip to Section 3 below.

Firstly: If you had email set up locally on your PC with POP3 (and not IMAP), depending on the configuration this may make it harder to migrate. For your future setup, consider using the web-based version, or at the very worst IMAP. There’s no good reason to use POP3 anymore other than to create sadness for technical people and data recovery situations.

1. Please ensure that you have good working backups before you do anything. Ensure your backup software isn’t configured to skip those mail store files (pst, mbox, eml, etc). If you don’t have backups, consider trying something like BackBlaze if you don’t want to worry about managing and maintaining a local backup device.
2. Try to examine your current email program to see if it’s set up for IMAP or POP. If you can’t determine that (or if you see multiple accounts), perform the following checks below:
   1. If you login to your mail provider’s web-based version of your old email and you don’t see everything (like you only see the last 5 or 14 or 30 days of email), then it’s likely that your old email only exists locally within your local email application. Be careful with what’s on your PC – Too often I’ve seen this with legacy GoDaddy email accounts, where users had 100mb inboxes but stored 10GB of their mail in Outlook in a POP3 setup. Their web inbox was just big enough to hold email when Outlook wasn’t running before it synced it down to their PC. Even worse is that you get 2 different sets of email on your phone vs your PC unless you keep your email application always running.
   2. If you see tons of mail, going back years, but you also see emails that you’ve deleted in your local email program, just assume that everything you’ve saved locally on your PC has not synchronized back to the web provider. This is typical of a POP3 setup. If you were to try to migrate the data from the web-based set of data, just be aware that you may be migrating a bunch of junk you already deleted.
   3. If you login to your old email provider’s website and see the same synced folders and emails that you have in your local email app, you’re probably set up with IMAP. If you don’t see any folders synchronized to the website but you have them in your local email app, you’re probably running POP3.
3. Only email is synced with IMAP or POP3. Not Contacts, Calendar items, Tasks, etc. Be sure to look up specific steps for your application to backup these sets of data.
4. If all of your email is determined to only exist on your local computer in an app, be mindful that some apps have made it quite hard to migrate away from them and you’re likely going to have a harder time.
   1. Outlook: If you’re set up in Outlook, you actually have the best chance to migrate the mail out successfully. Most of the time, you’d:
      1. Enable IMAP in your gmail account
      2. Change the IMAP Limits Per Folder in gmail IMAP settings.
      3. Export your mail to PST in Outlook. Ensure to check the “And all subfolders” when selecting your profile to export, or otherwise it’s going to only export the Inbox and nothing else. The Profile item is at the top of the selection list screen. This will take a long time and may require a substantial amount of disk space (usually anywhere from 500MB to 50GB)
      4. Go to Contacts and export any contacts
      5. Go to Calendar and export each calendar that you wish to keep individually, so you can import them later.
      6. Create a new Outlook profile in Control Panel (don’t delete the current one)
      7. Set up gmail locally in IMAP in the new profile and make that new profile your default profile
      8. Launch Outlook and import your saved PST into the empty IMAP setup
      9. I believe Google has set sync limits for email to be imported this way, so just keep in mind that you may need to keep Outlook opened for an extended period (days?) for this method to work.
      10. We exported to PST first because it re-validates the data on each email when exporting it, ensuring that it should import successfully wherever you go to use the mail. Often, older copies of email in Outlook change as the product gets patched or upgraded so it’s important to let Outlook re-validate this before trying to move it. While we could have used scanpst, this can actually cause corruption of the original working mailstore and is beyond the scope of this type of article.
   2. Thunderbird:
      1. Set up a gmail IMAP account in Thunderbird
      2. Create any folders in the gmail account in Thunderbird that you want to migrate from the old account
      3. Open a folder in the old account in Thunderbird
      4. Highlight any mail you want to copy (Ctrl-A should highlight all mail)
      5. Right click one of the messages and choose Copy To -> gmail address -> folder you created.
      6. Rinse, wash, repeat manually for each folder.
      7. Keep Thunderbird open until it’s done syncing everything to gmail.
   3.  Windows 10 Mail app
      1. You can only manually export each message as a .eml, one at a time.
      2. Remember: If you’re using IMAP, all of the mail should be on the web interface. If you’re using POP3 with Windows 10 Mail app, then all of your email is likely stuck locally on the PC unless the website retained it all (even what you deleted). It may be easier to migrate from what’s on the old email provider’s website instead.
   4. Windows Live Email
      1. We’ll all pray for you.
      2. Consider looking into reputable 3rd party programs to handle the migration from Windows Live Mail EML files to a unicode PST for Outlook 2007 or newer, then follow the Outlook steps above to do the migration. Be sure to only buy programs that offer a trial that you’ve tested and ones that offer refunds if it doesn’t work. There’s tons of scammy programs out there that try to do this.
5. If you do set up gmail on your local application again, please be mindful to test the send/receive, and then confirm that emails are being received and sent properly.

Section 2: Steps to create your new gmail account and prepare for the migration:

1. Create your new gmail account by going to gmail.com and following the new account process.
   1. I highly suggest setting up 2FA (2 Factor Authentication) at the same time as a security measure, so that it’s nearly impossible for someone to get into your account even if your password becomes compromised. Google offers multiple methods – a text with a security code, a 2FA rotating code on an app on your phone (like Authy, Google Authenticator, or Microsoft Authenticator), or even a simple notification for Android (any phone with that account on it) or iOS devices (any iPhone or iPad running the GMail app or the Google app, and the iPhone needs to be a 5S or newer). See here for more details: https://myaccount.google.com/signinoptions/two-step-verification
2. On the old email account, set up auto-reply (vacation alert). There should be an option to only send the vacation reminder to your stored contacts – that’ll help keep the auto-reply away from vendors and spam mail. Obviously this means that you need to ensure everyone is in your stored contacts, but that’s usually already the case.
3. Send an email out to everyone from your old email account contacts in batches. Most email providers have an email sending limit as well as a number-of-contacts-per-email limit. Search for your limits for your old email provider (or if it’s your Internet Provider, call them and ask). For instance, hotmail let you send up to 300 messages per day, but only up to 100 contacts per email. So at the very most, that’s 3 emails with 100 contacts and then you’d wait 24 hours before sending more. Gmail allows 500 total emails per day (where each contact on an email chain counts as an individual email), and also supports up to 500 recipients in a single email (one 500 person email and then you’d wait 24 hours).
4. Letting them know preemptively that you’ve updated to a new gmail address from your old address also makes the address change more legitimate. In the process, you may learn that a few of your email contacts are also out of date! Update your contacts list, and then export it to CSV (literally all apps/websites support contact import via CSV). If you’re unfamiliar with CSVs, it’s a large unstyled excel sheet that can be opened/edited in a simple text editor like Notepad as well. We’ll be keeping this CSV as a just-in-case backup. We’re doing this because you can run into problems importing more than 3000 contacts at a time into gmail. Often you have to break them into chunks before importing. Overall, gmail can handle 25000 contacts, which is more than enough for most people, but I have seen people hit the 3000 import-in-one-file limit before.

Section 3: Steps if you want to just do a straight web-based email to web-based email migration
If you only ever used the web-based email access before, or if your previous local email setup was IMAP, or if you don’t mind migrating whatever email exists in your provider’s POP3 mailbox, this section is for you.

1. Login to gmail. Click the gear icon towards the top right and choose “Configure Inbox”. I highly suggest enabling these tabs (and checking “Include starred in Primary”, especially if you have social media accounts and forums, as it makes it easier to clean up items. Typically, I “mark as read” everything under Social, Promotions, and Forums without worrying about missing something important when I get too many messages, as 99,9% of the important stuff ends up under Updates or Primary. It’s been consistent for me for years.
2. Click the Gear icon again and choose settings -> Accounts and Import -> Import Mail and Contacts.
3. It’ll ask for your old email credentials, if you want to import mail and contacts, and if you want to keep importing any new mail for the next 30 days. It will also ask if you want to apply a label to all of your imported mail – labels are like folders, but that you can categorize items into multiple labels. I’d I’d suggest attaching a label with your old email provider’s name (like Hotmail), check all of those checkboxes, then click Start The Import.
4. This will run for quite a long time depending on how much mail you have, and will display an import status within gmail.
5. You can close out of everything once it’s started running, as it’ll continue to run in the background on google’s end.
6. If you want to continue receiving old account emails beyond 30 days, you can usually set up forwarding on the old account.

Section 4: Prepare for the sheer number of website accounts you’re going to have to change

1. Do your most important email address changes first. Keep in mind that some websites/companies will make you open up a whole new account to change an email address, but these should be few and far between nowadays. If you have issues, call their support directly. This list is pretty rambling and extensive, and is in no particular order:
   1. Money-related stuff: Banks, Credit Union, credit cards, store cards, Paypal, Loan Providers, student loans, IRA Administrator, Investment management, accountant, tax prep (including TurboTax and HRBlock).
   2. Bills: gas, electric, phone, cable, internet, cell phones, sewers, water, garbage/recycling, ezpass/tolls, bus pass, parking pass, HOA
   3. Insurance companies: home, auto, renters, health, dental, life
   4. Security, alarms, one-off household hardware (sprinkler controls, IoT devices controlled from mobile apps, TVs/Roku
   5. Any business you interact with on a yearly or bi-yearly basis. Yearly subscriptions, like software or magazines. Bi-yearly stuff, like your doctor, dentist, vet, car dealership, fishing/hunting license,
   6. Any business you interact with on a monthly basis (more subscriptions). This includes web services like Netflix, Hulu, TeamViewer, etc.
   7. Online Shopping/Selling websites (Amazon, Newegg, eBay, craigslist, Kohls, etsy)
   8. Offline shopping (Ollie’s, harbor freight, walmart)
   9. File storage (OneDrive, dropbox, box, mediafire)
   10. Travel websites (expedia, rental car companies, hotels)
   11. Pharmacy websites where you can request a refill via website or app
   12. UPS/FedEx/USPS accounts
   13. Clubs/organizations/CO-OPs, including Costco, Sam’s Club, BJs, REI.
   14. Social websites (facebook, twitter, linkedin, flickr, soundcloud, youtube, reddit, yelp, etc)
   15. Any important warranty registrations (car, power tools, computers, pc part companies)
   16. Any software you bought a lifetime subscription to (email may be required to download the full copy or access your license key)
   17. Libraries
   18. Dynamic DNS setups
   19. Bitcoin account and/or wallet
   20. Steam and other game services like Steam
   21. Forums
   22. Hospitals, companies like LabCorp
   23. Entertainment (pandora, AMC theatres)
   24. Your resume, every resume uploaded to job search websites, and every job search website account. Do this now, even if you’re not looking for a job. When you are looking for a job years later, and you initially start applying with old info everywhere, you’ll have a sad time with lost opportunities.
   25. If any other email accounts use the old email account as a recovery email account.
   26. Any websites where you listed your email in plaintext (a personal blog)
   27. Any laptop/desktop/tablet/smartphone
   28. Any business cards
   29. Food websites (taco bell, chick-fil-a, grubhub, orderup, petsmart
   30. Whatever company you work for, if they have a record of your personal email anywhere. My secretary has it just in case the pinata called 365 Hosted Exchange finally breaks.
2. Once you’ve got all of your email into gmail, start searching for items under the Updates inbox tab in gmail for things that you missed. Then tackle Social, Forums, and Promotions tabs. To do this efficiently: You can filter to a specific tab category by search for “category:social” and then adding “-@facebookmail.com” to filter out any emails from facebook (the minus filters it out). For example, if I wanted to filter out facebook and linkedin, I’d do “category:social -@facebookmail.com -@linkedin.com” and see everything under the social tab that wasn’t from facebook or linkedin.
3. Check your bank account statements for any recurring subscriptions/bills/bill payer that you pay for. I thought I had everything but nearly forgot one, and it was because their notification email address didn’t match the company name.
4. The last place to check would be to check your saved passwords for any websites you missed. For the most common browsers, you should be able to use WebBrowserPassView from nirsoft.net, but be aware it will get flagged by nearly every AV product out there because malicious people love to utilize this great free tool for nefarious things. On its own it’s completely clean and very useful for personal backup/reference, or for migration to a password management tool. Depending on your setup, it may not be able to pull Chrome passwords or any passwords saved in addon password managers like LastPass, so you’d have to reference those directly within chrome or the password manager.

• This reply was modified 3 years, 9 months ago by VulturEMaN. Reason: reformatting headers

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JohnS1606

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VulturEMaN wrote:

Firstly: If you had email set up locally on your PC with POP3 (and not IMAP), depending on the configuration this may make it harder to migrate. For your future setup, consider using the web-based version, or at the very worst IMAP. There’s no good reason to use POP3 anymore other than to create sadness for technical people and data recovery situations.

Of course, that assumes that your email provider is worthy of maintaining the only copy of your online correspondence. MSPs can fail (technically or financially), can be attacked, or can prove themselves unworthy of such trust.

Local email storage (preferably redundant) has its place, especially for home users who would otherwise have no backups to turn to.

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Thanks to the first two posters for your comprehensive posts.

VulturEMaN wrote:

There’s no good reason to use POP3 anymore

That’s not true, the reasons have been well documented here by me and others, so I’m not going to repeat them—don’t have time anyway.

POP3 is simple to use with multiple devices too. Set one as your HQ, and configure deletion from the server either on download, or when you delete the email locally. All other devices, configure to leave the email on the server.

With regard to the general topic, by far the surest way is to get your own domain, as others have said above.

Fyi there are temp email services which some may find useful. Eg 10 Minute Mail will give you an address which will go dead after 10 mins—useful for some sign-up & confirmation routines.

Lugh.
~
Alienware Aurora R6; Win10 Home x64 1803; Office 365 x32
i7-7700; GeForce GTX 1060; 16GB DDR4 2400; 1TB SSD, 256GB SSD, 4TB HD

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SueW

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I have yet another slant on this [two actually]. first, I’m a pop3/local email user. That eliminates the problem of moving thousands of on-server emails from one place to another. My PC is my central hub and email on my tablet is secondary and I haven’t yet had a need to go through that email from five years ago on it. I use IMAP on my tablet when I’m away from my PC and then when I get home I just move the tablet’s email back to the “inbox” and it all magically gets downloaded to my PC. Note that I also don’t keep ALL of my email. On an average day I think I get maybe 5 or 10 emails worth keeping and I just delete the rest. Another aspect of this [think “John Podesta” :o)] is that I don’t trust the online servers. From what I can tell, they have no legal obligation to preserve their service [your email could disappear tomorrow!] nor to keep it private [beyond the obvious, where they scan your email, basically, to spy on you so they can send you ads].

Second, for decades now I’ve just used a “personal” domain. Again, that’s not particularly expensive and makes changing email addresses much easier . I have public posts from 20+ years ago that have my email address in them and even though it is going to a different mail server, it is the same email address.

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wavy

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(IMAP)

jabeattyauditor wrote:

Of course, that assumes that your email provider is worthy of maintaining the only copy of your online correspondence

Using IMAP doesn’t prevent keeping a local copy. Multi-folder trees synced over IMAP is what I usually recommend…

You can sync that to multiple devices even. Cross-sync between 2 servers is also possible.

berniec wrote:

for decades now I’ve just used a “personal” domain. Again, that’s not particularly expensive and makes changing email addresses much easier . I have public posts from 20+ years ago that have my email address in them and even though it is going to a different mail server, it is the same email address

This is a very good way to do things, yes. IF you can get a decent deal on it – some offerings I’ve seen were rather more expensive than they should be. Also requires a bit more technical skills than usual.

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VulturEMaN wrote:

There’s no good reason to use POP3 anymore other than to create sadness for technical people and data recovery situations.

What do you mean by that very puzzling remark? Are you actually advocating folks sell their souls to gmail and the like? I refuse to communicate with ANYONE who uses gmail and since a lot of users know that privacy oriented users hate gmail they deliberately try to fake a non gmail account so I haven’t communicated with most people by email in many years.

I have used Thunderbird since its inception. I keep all email on my ISP’s servers forever (about 18 years now) and on my computers the TB folders reside on my D drive NOT the SSD C drive. I still Telnet occasionally into the mail server as that can be very useful at times. I use email for forum registrations, website purchases, etc. NEVER for personal mail (exept one ccount outside the USA). I use POP ONLY. I hate webmail but I have to access it to make changes in any account from my ISP. For the few personal contacts that I allow, I use an Israeli email account that is far more secure than my ISP or other USA email accounts. None of my accounts in TB have my real name under “your name”..all names are fake.

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Mele20 wrote:

What do you mean by that very puzzling remark?

Huh? What does the client protocol have to do with specific service providers?

Most of the small ISPs around the planet have offered IMAP for more than 10 years now, some much longer.

POP3 is a headache mostly because most of the end-user visible implementations don’t differentiate between mail that’s still on the server and mail that’s only stored locally. Wasn’t just once or twice that I’ve had to tell people their mail folders were stored only locally on the old device, and of course their backups didn’t include the mail client’s backend storage in any usable format.

Modern versions of Thunderbird allow local storage in Maildir format, which is greatly preferable – you can actually back up and recover single mails from that. Getting an IMAP-synced Maildir-format folder tree on Windows was unreasonably hard for a long time already.

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Mele20 wrote:

VulturEMaN wrote:

There’s no good reason to use POP3 anymore other than to create sadness for technical people and data recovery situations.

What do you mean by that very puzzling remark? Are you actually advocating folks sell their souls to gmail and the like? I refuse to communicate with ANYONE who uses gmail and since a lot of users know that privacy oriented users hate gmail they deliberately try to fake a non gmail account so I haven’t communicated with most people by email in many years.

I have used Thunderbird since its inception. I keep all email on my ISP’s servers forever (about 18 years now) and on my computers the TB folders reside on my D drive NOT the SSD C drive. I still Telnet occasionally into the mail server as that can be very useful at times. I use email for forum registrations, website purchases, etc. NEVER for personal mail (exept one ccount outside the USA). I use POP ONLY. I hate webmail but I have to access it to make changes in any account from my ISP. For the few personal contacts that I allow, I use an Israeli email account that is far more secure than my ISP or other USA email accounts. None of my accounts in TB have my real name under “your name”..all names are fake.

Count your lucky stars if you have had the same e-mail address thru your ISP for decades. I’ve moved around from ISP to ISP every few years, my oldest e-mail address would have been based on FIDOnet link into the Internet, followed by dial-up netcom, followed by Warwick.net, followed by Citlink.net, followed by Hotmail, Juno, Yahoo, Aol, GMail, Winlink.Org, HVC.RR.COM, Frontiernet.net, ARRL.NET, etc. A long time ago I decided to make the hotmail account my main e-mail account and have not been sorry for this decision. Citlink turned into Frontier and sold off their e-mail to Yahoo which was bought out by Verizon. It’s a real mess trying to configure many but not all Frontier run by Yahoo e-mail accounts for Thunderbird due to the non Yahoo standard security settings put in place by Frontier.

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Get your own domain

🍻

Just because you don't know where you are going doesn't mean any road will get you there.

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Lugh, MrJimPhelps

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Years ago I asked people on Windows Secrets Forums what they recommended I do – I had to change email addresses, but I never wanted to have to do it again after doing that one time. It was recommended that I get my own domain.

For your personal email, you should consider getting an .org domain rather than a .com domain – there are a lot more .org domains than there are .com domains.

Once you get your own domain, you’ll never have to change email addresses again, as long as you keep up with the registration fees on your domain – in other words, you’ll own it for the rest of your life.

If you get your own domain, you’ll need to host your email with someone. There are a lot of good hosting companies out there. In fact, they may give you unlimited email addresses with your email hosting. You’ll be tempted to give everyone an email address on your domain; but keep in mind that if you do that, you will be stuck with those people forever, because if you cancel them, they will need to go through the hassle of changing their email address with everyone.

Group "L" (Linux Mint)
with Windows 8.1 running in a VM

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Lugh

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wavy wrote:

Get your own domain

And a good hosting service that also provides E-Mail service and SPAM/Virus/Malware protection.

Before you wonder "Am I doing things right," ask "Am I doing the right things?"

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I disagree with the goal of having a single new email address. The safest way to operate is to use multiple email addresses all of them tied to a domain that you own. For ex:

amazon@mydomain.com

somemagazine@mydomain.com

someretailer@mydomain.com

Far too many companies use an email address as a userid, and when they get hacked, bad guys are halfway to getting into your accounts. Multiple emails at a single domain can be auto-forwarded to a single inbox. More on this here

https://defensivecomputingchecklist.com/#xcredit

 

Get up to speed on router security at RouterSecurity.org and Defensive Computing at DefensiveComputingChecklist.com

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ibe98765, jburk07

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Last year I decided I didn’t want my email address to be tied to my ISP (i.e., @verizon.net) so I went through many of the very helpful steps outlined above.

As I emailed, or replied to, my personal correspondents, I’d use my old email address with an added signature file (sig file) at the bottom, something like this:

“*************************

Please note new email address: skw@NewEmailAddress.com”

Win 7 SP1 Home Premium 64-bit; Office 2010; Group B (SaS); Former 'Tech Weenie'

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Elly

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Eight years past, I changed my Internet Service Provider and my mail address. Despite repeated informational efforts on my part, my mother-in-law is still sending mail to the old address and wondering why it doesn’t work.

Carpe Diem {with backup and coffee}
offline▸ Win10Pro 2004.19041.572 x64 i3-3220 RAM8GB HDD Firefox83.0b3 WindowsDefender
offline▸ Acer TravelMate P215-52 RAM8GB Win11Pro 22H2.22621.1265 x64 i5-10210U SSD Firefox106.0 MicrosoftDefender
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@geekdom, Is that a good or a bad predicament?
Joking aside, the only time we used our ISP mail (webmail to be precise) was to retrieve monthly statements/bills..nothing else since around 2006.

Keep IT Lean, Clean and Mean!

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I have provided her with current information. She tells my spouse that she sent me mail (to the old address), but it didn’t work.

All the right steps cannot counteract limited skill set.

Carpe Diem {with backup and coffee}
offline▸ Win10Pro 2004.19041.572 x64 i3-3220 RAM8GB HDD Firefox83.0b3 WindowsDefender
offline▸ Acer TravelMate P215-52 RAM8GB Win11Pro 22H2.22621.1265 x64 i5-10210U SSD Firefox106.0 MicrosoftDefender
online▸ Win11Pro 22H2.22621.1413 x64 i5-9400 RAM16GB HDD Firefox112.0b3 MicrosoftDefender

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I have my own domain name email address, which is used by close friends.

Then I have about 10 Gmail addresses that are used to segregate various tasks ( one is for career stuff, one is for genealogical research, one is for Android subjects, one is for my fake FB account, etc.).

What I like about the Gmail addresses is that I have them tied to my Android phone, so I get notice of any email immediately, no matter where I happen to be.  I don’t have any problem with Google knowing my life details.    In fact, I connected my primary credit card (American Express) to Google, so they get notified of any new charges and send them to me via a notification on my phone.  Now if someone hacks/steals my CC number and successfully makes a charge, I will see it happen almost immediately.

Next I have long subscribed (at least 10 years) to a disposable email service (spamex.com) for $10/year.  This allows me to create up to 500 email addresses at any one time.  I currently have about 300 active addresses but many of them don’t get much email at all.

I use these for forum subscriptions, email subscriptions, eBay, PayPal, frequent flier and hotel accounts, credit card accounts, etc.  These all forward into another Gmail address.  Well worth the small yearly cost, especially when I have to change an email address because the website got hacked or some rogue employee stole and sold the email address dB.

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Many years ago, I had a bigfoot.com email account.  Email was sent to the bigfoot mail server, then redirected to my real email account. At the bigfoot site, I linked my real email address to the bigfoot address. I did this when my ISP (real email provider) was taken over, and all email accounts were changed.  Using this ‘bigfoot’ email, I only needed to change the redirected account within the bigfoot email system – very easy.

I also created several ‘bigfoot’ email accounts with redirection, used for personal, business, subscriptions, government business, and throw-away. Most were re-directed to my real email account(s), and some were redirected to throw-away accounts.

Bigfoot emails are no longer around, but I don’t know if there is such a service available?

 

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If you buy your own domain, pretty much every registrar will offer forwarding as a free service.

Get up to speed on router security at RouterSecurity.org and Defensive Computing at DefensiveComputingChecklist.com

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I use a proxy e-mail service, SpamGourmet. But it is no longer accepting new users. (Its developer wants to retire. Somebody really should take it over.)

Its advantage is that I never send out an e-mail with the core {protected} e-mail address. I can create new e-mail address on the fly. What I show as the “From:” field is something ending in “xoxy.net” It is a valid e-mail address, but some e-mail suites consider anything from xoxy.net to be spam and bounce the e-mail. 🙁

When it works, people responding to it will have their e-mail forwarded to the core / protected address. If they are trustworthy, I whitelist their e-mail address. If it winds up in the possession of a spammer, the address will expire after a certain number of e-mails. The spam e-mails will be automatically eaten. This is how I have avoided spammers, worms, and virus senders since 2005.

Important links you can use, without the monetization pitch = https://pqrs-ltd.xyz/bookmark4.html

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