As the go-to IT girl in my small firm, I’m helping somebody who’s otherwise brilliant but not tech-savvy transition from one of his old e-mail addresses to his newer one, since the old one often ends up in spam filters and generally makes him look un-hip.
It’s complicated but I think I have a good handle on what I’m doing. However, he asked me a question yesterday that I hadn’t thought of: Old Address is also his log-in for several websites that require an e-mail address for you log in, mostly business-related and financial sites run by trade publications and large banks, etc. I plan to discontinue the Old Address by the end of the month and cancel the whole account with un-hip provider. Will it affect his being able to log into these sites?
I don’t think it’ll be much of a problem since I don’t imagine the site pings the e-mail address every time he logs in, but I’d like a better answer to give him than “I think it won’t matter.” Also, some of these passwords need to be changed every year or so, what will the site do when it tries to send the notice to the Old Address and it bounces back? Thanks!
It doesn’t matter. The e-mail address is only used for the initial login and for recovering a lost password. Most sites also have a way for you to change your e-mail address (though you may have to keep the same login).
I forgot the password, and in the mean time, I’d given up the email address that was attached to the Amazon account. So no way to get a hold of the password update emails from Amazon. Not a big deal, since you can just start a new account, but a bit of a hassle.
Suggest to your co-worker that he go in and make all these changes before you close down the old email address.
Concur with everyone else - only a problem if he needs to recover a password.
However, just in case that ever does happen, I’d recommend he log in and change everything to a newer address while he still can - especially for more important stuff. Less-important, it’s not as big a deal - for example if I lose my Epicurious account, that’s at most an annoyance.
Some sites, in addition, have ways of doing recovery by emailing an alternate email address, or sending a text message to your phone, or the like. For those sites that support that, it’s worth doing.
Oooh - just thought of another reason to fix them soonest: A lot of sites, if you log in and change your account information, will send out a notification to your old address saying “did you do this? If so, cool, if not, contact us!”. If he doesn’t change his login, those notices would go to the old address and he’d never see them. So if someone gains access and starts getting up to mischief, he would never know unless he happened to log in himself.
This may not be useful to you, but I’ll tell you anyways: one thing I did when transitioning email accounts was to set up an autoresponder that informed people of my new address. That way, any non-spambot who cared enough to email me would be informed, even if I hadn’t thought to tell them my new email address. There was at least one fairly important email I wouldn’t have gotten if not for that setup.
It’s worth noting that some sites will also use email to confirm a change of password. So it would be a good idea to tell him to change his contact information at these sites before ditching the old address.
It will matter at some point. Your friend will need to reset his password on one of those sites at some point, and won’t be able to. If they’re doing their jobs properly, support staff at those sites won’t hand over control of an account to anyone but the holder of the email address they have on file.
As EKDS5k says, change the contact email address on those sites first.