Should you move?
No one wants to move to a new email address. It's about as painful as moving to a new house, but just like a new house, sometimes, an upgrade is in order.
Recently we've had quite a lot of clients whose email is hosted with a particular provider, who have been thinking about moving. I'm going to allow this provider to remain nameless for this article, but it's been historically very popular in NZ, and has now decided to charge users a monthly fee to continue to use email through them. We have been wondering for a while now why this provider has not yet updated the way that they provide email. When new and better technology has become available, they have failed to keep up with it, and their email service and now performing rather badly. In fact, this failure to improve combined with the newly implemented fees, suggests to us that this service is on the way out. If I've suggested that you take a look at this blog, it may well be time to move to a new email address.
How does one move?
Unfortunately, moving to a new email address is not a quick job that we can do for you. I suggest that you take your time and allow a few months to carefully and systematically move through the process.
First you need to set up your new email address. We recommend an Outlook email address because it will work best with the Outlook application, which most people are using as part of Microsoft 365 (what was the old Office). If you already have a Gmail account you could use that, but don't try to access it via the Outlook app - Microsoft and Google are not friends and make no effort to have their products work together nicely. You can access Gmail via an internet browser.
If you have the Outlook app and your new email address is also Outlook, you can add it to your Outlook app and move your folder structure. We can assist you with this step if you need help. If you are in the happy position of having both your old and new email addresses in the Outlook app then it's possible to drag any folders you may have set up in the old one straight into the new email address. Again, we can assist with this if necessary. If it's more than say, 15 folders though, you may wish to have us carry out this part in a more careful and comprehensive manner. Some people have an elaborate folder structure in their email with many hundreds or thousands of emails organised there, in which case it would be better to have us do this for you.
Next, update your personal contacts. It used to be that everyone had a personal contacts list but now that email applications save contacts automatically and auto-populate them into new emails, this is now largely obsolete. What this means is that you can't easily grab the list and send out a mass email. The easiest way to carry out this step is when you respond to each email, just let the person know that you're changing to a new email address. You could add it to your signature in the old email address, set up an automatic reply, or just type it in each time. This is the main reason that this process is going to take several months. Over this period you will probably be in contact with everyone who it's important knows your correct email address. If there's anyone else you can think of, just flick them an email.
Also advise the companies and organisations who provide you services. No doubt you'll have many businesses that email you invoices for ongoing services. They will all need to be contacted. You also probably have several companies that send you regular emails, maybe with specials or a newsletter etc. You could take this opportunity to escape from some of those but if there are any (like maybe your local, helpful computing company) that you do wish to keep, please let them know. Also on this list will be organisations like IRD, your vehicle registration provider etc; those who contact you maybe only annually but for whom it's quite important that they have your correct contact details.
Make a list of services you log into for which your old email address is the username. Everyone these days has a long list of services for which they have an account and it's very common for your email address to be the username. You may be able to change this when you log in but if you can't change the username it's often not really a problem, as long as you have managed to update the contact email address. Usually, the username is just an identifier, and it won't matter if the email address it refers to is no longer active.
Check and update the recovery email address for all accounts. This is extremely important. The last thing you want to happen is that you forget a password to an account and when you go to recover it, the recovery email address is no longer active. This is a good opportunity to really get a handle on all of your accounts and make sure that recovery is set up and correct. The two I would draw your attention to in particular is your domain if you have one, and your Microsoft account. Remember, if you have an account and log into it via an internet browser, you have a password. If you never have to enter your password it will be because it's saved to your internet browser (which I can show you how to access and check if necessary).