Ditching Your Outdated Email Address (Without Having to Let Everybody Know)

If you’ve been paying attention, I’ve commented on how certain email providers (namely Optimum, Yahoo, AOL, and Hotmail, among others) haven’t been keeping pace with the more sophisticated providers, such as Gmail, iCloud, and ProtonMail. These companies have been around for years, all of them before Google, but sadly, all of them are fails one way or another.

Yes, Google buys and sells your data (and trust me, they’re not the only ones out there doing that!), but if you can look beyond that, the company knows how handle email. (And search as well.) Using Google as your mail provider (or host) will solve your spam mail problem.

But switching isn’t always easy. Your Yahoo (or whatever) email address is embedded in many aspects of your life, and a quick switch to Gmail (or whoever) isn’t simply a matter of telling others you have a new email address. If any of your oft-used accounts (your bank, social security, Amazon accounts, et al.) are linked with your lousy email address, backing out and reestablishing with a new address is quite a chore.

To forward your email to a new address, you must log in to your email provider using a browser – Safari, Chrome, Firefox, whichever one works for you. (And means you need to know your email password!) Somewhere in there is the option to forward your mail to a new address. For example, in Optimum, in the webmail page, click SETTINGS>MAIL>MAIL FORWARDING and enter your email address in the field. You should UNCHECK “Keep a copy in your inbox” to avoid junk mail buildup. This is a similar process to what AOL and Yahoo mail users need to complete to enable the forwarding of their email to another address.