Are you trying to start using a new email address and stop using an older one? For example, are you moving homes and thus will no longer be able to keep your old comcast.net email account? Or did you change jobs and thus need to stop using your old employer’s email account? If so, here’s an overview of what this process commonly involves. This transition can take a surprising amount of time and effort. Typically, there are two primary tasks to be accomplished:

1. Notify family and friends
2. Update all of your online accounts that use your old email address.

Let’s look at each of these in a bit more detail. 

To initially notify family and friends, make sure you send the email from your new email address. This way, if they reply to your email message, they will be using your new email address. Notifying family and friends is easy, but getting everybody to start using the email address can require follow-up reminders.

When you send this initial notification email to family and friends it’s customary to address the message to yourself and to put all of your friends and family member’s email addresses on the BCC (Blind Carbon Copy) line of the message. This way, you won’t display all of the recipients’ email addresses to each other.

Your initial notification message might read something like this: Effective immediately please start to use my new email address, . Please add this email address to your address book and remove my old email address from your address book. If your old email account is going to stop working on a given date, include this date in your email and hopefully it will motivate some recipients to act upon your request.

The more challenging task is to update all of your online accounts that use your old email address. This could include all sorts of accounts such as your: bank, health insurance provider, car insurance provider, frequent flyer account, etc. Don’t forget about the myriad of website accounts you have for netflix.com, nytimes.com, llbean.com, amazon.com, zappos.com, etc.

Many of your online accounts use an email address as both the username and as the email address for communications. Sometimes you’ll be able to change both. Other times, you won’t be able to change your username, you’ll only be able to change the email address they use for communications.  Apple doesn’t let you change your AppleID username, but they will let you enter a new email address for communications. For example, if my AppleID username were , but I wanted to stop using that email address then I could setup a new address, such as  for communications. However, my username would, forever more, remain . Apple would thus use this new email address if I ask them to send me an email to let me reset my AppleID password. Most people have dozens of online account so it can a considerable amount of time to update all of your accounts. If you do not already maintain a list of your online accounts, now is a good time to start to build it. You could, potentially, spend an entire afternoon updating all of your accounts in one fell swoop. Alternatively, if you have more time available to make this switch then you could update the accounts as you use them over the coming months.

At some point, your old email account should only receive a few email messages each day. Or, your old account might still receive a lot of email, but it would hopefully all be junk email from organizations or individuals that you don’t care about. At this point, the switch is finished.