Changing your email provider

Do you still have the email address your ISP (internet provider) gave you? What will happen when you change internet providers? Will you still be able to access this email for free? It might be time to hoose your own email provider, here are a few points why:

• Access your emails from any program (Outlook, Apple Mail, Thunderbird) plus from the web and you can customise how the pages look and function
• Spam filters are generally much better with other email providers
• Your inbox is usually much bigger, a few fancy catalogues or pictures won’t fill it up and prevent you from getting new messages
• Some email providers allow you create ‘dummy’ email addresses or aliases that allow you to sign up for newsletters and more without disclosing your real email address. If they get difficult about cancelling the newsletters or other email, you just discard that address and all is good.

So how do you change your email address?

• Have a look on the web what is around (e.g Gmail.com, Outlook.com, ), compare what they provide and choose one (or even 2 or 3, you can have an unlimited amount of email addresses, not just one) of them.
  Sign up and make sure you provide recovery methods (like a phone number, another email …) so you can get to your emails if you happen to forget your password.
• Send an email to all you contacts informing them of your new email address
• Make sure you contact any businesses, websites, streaming services and other online accounts (bank, myGov…) etc on THEIR WEBSITE OR PHONE to change your email address, they generally do not accept changes any other way.
• If you can, set up automatic forwarding from your old email address to your new address and monitor this for any senders you missed
• You could also set up automatic replies from your old email address to inform any senders of your new address
  

It requires a bit of work, but it is definitely worth it.