Changing Your Email Address

If you use the email address you created from your High Speed Internet Provider, what happens when you change providers?

• You lose your old email address from your previous provider. Depending on the provider, you may be able to cancel your High Speed Internet Access contract, but keep your old email address for a small monthly fee. Usually, you will be able to receive emails, but not send them.
• You probably tell all your old contacts in your address book about your new email address and tell them when the old one will no longer work. Usually that was accomplished by creating a distribution list of all your contacts you wanted to update and sending them an email with your new email address. In the age of SPAM, this has become problematic. One of my clients had her email refused to send because the 179 contacts in the distribution list looked like an attempt to send SPAM. I left her with the task of making smaller, less SPAM-like distribution lists to send out her announcement with. One thing that might make your announcement easier is setting a vacation message. Once you log onto your High Speed Internet Providers website, somewhere in the preferences for your email account may be the ability to create an auto-reply message that gets sent to everyone who sends you an email during a period of time you specify. We have all seen these messages at one time or another where the message informs you that so and so will be out of the office for a week and will have limited access to email. You can change this feature to broadcast your email address change instead.
• If you are a business or someone who wants their own website, your alternative to ever changing your email address is selecting and buying a domain (the part of your email to the right of the "@" sign). Once you pay a web hosting company to host your domain, you can create email addresses with your new domain as part of the email address. As long as you renew the fee to re-register your domain, your email address will remain the same regardless of how many times you change web hosting companies. This concept is similar to your cell phone number where changing from T-Mobile to Verizon does not mean your cell phone number must change.
• An alternative to spending money on a domain is the Google Gmail account. This is free and the email address you pick is limited by your imagination and whether someone else has already used your idea. Gmail is not dependent on any High Speed Internet Provider.

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