An email address is almost as important as your home address. All your emails come in on it, so you won't just switch to another address. But suppose you have to, for example because you want to switch from Gmail to Outlook. How do you avoid missing important emails?
Choose wisely
Before we give you tips on the most efficient way to switch to a new e-mail address, it is important that you also think carefully about the new e-mail address you are taking. Let's say you get a new email account because you changed ISP. Who says that in two years there won't be another great offer or development that will make you switch again? You do not want to have to notify everyone of a change again in the short term.
In this time it is therefore not wise to let your e-mail address depend on your provider. And it is unnecessary, there are plenty of free services such as Gmail, Outlook.com and so on, which in principle you never have to change. Want to be even more confident? Just register your own domain, then you can be sure that your e-mail address (which is linked to that domain) really never needs to change.
Choose a service that you are sure will serve you well in the coming years.
Old shoes...
It's a nice saying: don't throw away old shoes until you have new ones. And when it comes to email, it's also a good idea to keep the old shoes for a while, even if you have new ones. As long as you don't cancel your old e-mail address (a period of half a year of overlap is more than enough), you can easily discover whether you have converted everything to your new address and if not (for example, you account and you do not remember the password) then you can still gratefully use your old address).
Make sure that you have the mails from your old address forwarded to your new address, so that you do not have to check two mail services every time. Create a filter in your new mail service, so that the mails from your old mail address end up in a separate folder, and you can go through the folder once a week to see if there is still mail coming in. In an ideal situation, after a few months, only spam will come in, and you can leave that behind.
Communicate and Modify
Once you've completed the preparation steps for the switch, it's time to let friends, family members, and other contacts know that you have a new email address. Do not let it be known that your old e-mail address will still exist, because then there is a good chance that people will think 'I'll adjust that later' and that later often never comes again.
The second step is to adjust all your accounts, such as Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, but also subscriptions to newspapers, magazines and so on. Unless you're keeping an extensive record, there's a good chance you'll forget a service here. That is why it is wise to keep your old address for the time being. After all, if you're moving, you probably use a forwarding service for that as well.
Change your e-mail address with all services you use, such as Facebook.
