I’m about to switch my old email address which I’ve had for about 7 years to my GMail account. I’m sick of the 25+ spams I get a day, plus my new address sounds so much cooler.
Anyway, the only problem is that everyone who knows me on the internet uses my comcast.net email to contact me, thus requiring the utilization of an email forwarding service.
Are there any free, easy-to-use email forwarding services that will forward from @comcast.net to @gmail.com? I’ve found Return Path – is it any good?
Are you quitting comcast? Sorry I can’t answer your question exactly, but here’s how I’ve always changed emails –
Step 1: Send out an email to everyone in your address book notifying them of your change in email address. In nice big letters right up front, ask everyone to make changes immediately in their own address books regarding your email. You’ll probably want to send out this email from your old account since people with particularly agressive filters (or just common sense) won’t open email from someone they don’t know.
Optional step 2: Send out an email to the same from your new address again asking everyone to make sure that they’ve acknowledged this new address as your primary and ONLY email address.
Keep in mind for the above two steps, you can send out the email with everyone’s address in the blindcopy field. This might be a good idea if it’s a mix of personal and work contacts.
Step 3: This step is kinda annoying, but neccesary. Continue to periodically check your old email address for people who still contact you there (perhaps they weren’t in your address book and didn’t get the update email). Again, reply to them in big large letters that they need to update your information right away. Sometime when I want to be really silly, I’ll respond to people who use my old address pretending that I’m some kind of automatic email forwarder: “WARNING, THE INTENDED RECIPIENT OF THIS MESSAGE HAS CHANGED HIS EMAIL ADDRESS TO XXXX@XXX.COM. PLEASE UPDATE YOUR RECORDS AND RE-SEND THIS MESSAGE TO THE CORRECT ADDRESS.” This works on some of my really lazy friends.
As time goes on, you will need to check this old email more and more infrequently. Down to perhaps once a month for a year. At that point, you might want to figure that anyone who hasn’t emailed you in a year or you haven’t emailed to, isn’t worth fretting over.
Obviously the above solution is free, and I think the advantage is that if you were to use some forwarding service, wouldn’t it just forward all the spam as well (kinda defeating the point of changing addresses?)
