Business and Home Email Address Changes: How to Make the Notification Process Easier

We all know that changing your email address is in itself a relatively easy process, but the days of simply sending off a friendly change of email notice to your best friends is long gone. Notifications now include the scores of websites with which you interact. The task is tedious to say the least. I know, I just did it and I’m ready for a vacation. Here’s what you can expect.

The easiest way to change your email address is to do it at your own pace. That works great if have an aol, gmail, yahoo, or hotmail account, but it can be a bit harder if you’ll be saying good-bye to your current internet service provider like AT&T, Comcast or Earthlink and your old email is associated with that account.

Don’t give up access to your old email account too quickly. Most providers won’t let you forward your mail or even give you a grace period. Of course policies change, so check with them first.

Start notifying the contacts in your address book right away - at least a month before you really get rid of the old email. It may take a while before people get around to changing their address books.

Most email programs have group features that allow you to separate your business and personal contacts. Some make it easy to send group emails while hiding the addresses. Just remember, if you have over 100 contacts within a group and you try emailing everyone in one mailing it will probably fail. ISP spam filters are set to prevent outgoing mass mailings, so break up those groups into several emails.

Forward all emails from your old address to your new email address until you feel comfortable deleting the old account or changing ISP providers. If you can label email that is addressed directly to your new email account with a label such as “sent directly to my new email”, you’ll be able to distinguish the forwarded old mail from those being sent to the new address.

Does your address book list all your on-line accounts or does it just list your friends and business associates? Everyone under eighty knows that website interaction, on-line subscriptions, web commerce, on-line banking, and social networking services have exploded and we have more on-line contacts and accounts than ever before. It makes sense to have those sites listed in an important place that is easily accessible.

If you have a complete list of those sources, then half, (ok maybe a third) of the battle is done. Now all you have to do is to spend a few weeks notifying all those websites. If you have a personal assistant, good for you. Just pass this article along with my condolences. If not, read on.

Prepare to visit all those on-line businesses, website membership accounts and subscriptions you can locate. Then manually change your email address in the customer account settings. For all those contacts that are not set-up to make email preference changes on their websites, expect to call them directly.

If you don’t have a list, or a complete list, You can search for those sources from the following locations:

1. Your address book for people, companies and websites to whom you send and receive email.
2. Your archived email on both your computer and on your ISP’s server for people, companies and websites from whom you have received mail in the past.
3. Your “sent mail” folders.
4. Your trashed email folders.
5. Back-up disks, stickie notes or hard-drives that may list older on-line memberships, accounts and subscriptions.

6. Google your email address. If you have put your address within any pages of your blogs or on-line articles they should show up on the first page of the search engine.

Make a spreadsheet of all your important contacts, on-line accounts, suppliers and memberships. Put a check box next to each source as you make changes, so you can record your progress.

Once logged-in to an account, navigate to your Profile page, Account Page or Settings Page. Every website uses different terminology so don’t be surprised if it takes a while to find the right page on which you can change your email address. Once (and if) you find it, replace your current email with your new email. Make sure your spelling is accurate especially if the site doesn’t make you enter it twice to confirm. Once that’s done, log out and log in again. Navigate to the same page to make sure your new email has been recorded.

Go back to your spreadsheet and check off the site as being updated with your new email.

In a perfect cyber-word that is all that you have to do; however……

1 - If you use different User ID’s and Passwords for different sites you’ll have to enter them correctly into each site’s Log In page. Unless you have a photographic memory, prepare to look them up. If you forgot your password or ID you’ll have several more steps to follow. Be prepared to answer those “secret questions” and/or to change your password. If you do have to change your password and you had a simple password to begin with, you’ll discover that many sites now require complicated passwords that contain upper and lower case letters, numbers and symbols. Ah, it’s all for our own good, right?

2 - I mentioned earlier that some sites make it really hard to find the place where you change your email, but some major sites don’t even have a place to do so. I was astounded to learn that Evite, the popular invitation service say’s right on the screen that “The ability to add or merge accounts is not available at this time.” In other words, you can’t change your email.

3 - Expect some of your email updates to fail. Yes, some sites have trouble making your new email “stick”, even though you did everything right; in fact, you may find you can sign-in to their site and view your new email listed in your profile. Send them an email from both your email addresses. If things don’t correct themselves, call customer service.

4 - Expect to make your own mistakes. If you are still receiving emails to your old address, it could be that you incorrectly entered your new email address and mail is defaulting to the old address. It is not uncommon for this to happen when you are doing a massive data entry project. In these unfortunate instances, you usually find out about your own error from customer service when you call them to complain.

If you would rather not go through the trouble of doing all of this dreary stuff and you don’t have a personal assistant on call, you can always make your email changes as you receive new emails from each on-line source, or when you log-in to each site. Of course, that could take months, maybe even years, but if you’re not terribly concerned about missing emails or if you’re sure you will never lose your old email address, it’s an option.

I put off making the big change for years because I held a silly attachment to my email address. Psychologists say that’s not uncommon, but when it becomes more important to you than good internet service it’s just vanity, as was that email address.

In any case, when the time comes, I hope this Hub will guide you in making the big change-over easier or at least keep you from losing your cool or your mind.

Good luck and happy data entry.

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