Switching Google Accounts: Change of Email Address

One of the easiest parts of changing your email address to get wrong is notifying your friends, family, co-workers, and anyone else you might need to receive email from. I’ve gone through 12 of these in my life, and I feel that I’m getting fairly good at it.

Setting a Deadline

In the past I have failed to set a deadline, with disastrous results. Without one, many people can and will procrastinate updating their contact list. I’m nearly sure that, somebody I know is still sending email to an account I abandoned 8 years ago, because I failed to set a deadline. It doesn’t have to be a hard deadline: you don’t have to stop reading your old email account as soon as it passes — in fact, you’d be wise to continue checking it for a month or two, incase you missed somebody.

I set a deadline 3 days away from when I sent the email, and had at least 90% of my buddies switched over by the end of the first day — the remaining 10% were people I have no other contact with except through email, so I’ll have to wait for them to email me next time to see. You may need to set the deadline further down the road than I did — most of my contacts are obsessive email addicts, so I knew a large portion of them would check their email in that time-frame.

Choosing Who You Want to Notify

Be sure to focus on family, friends and co-workers when sending your notifications. It is recommended that you do not send notifications to mailing lists, unless you are a very important member — perhaps you can put a notice in your signature for a couple months, if you feel its really important that they know who the “new” guy is.

The Notification Message

Be sure to be polite, courteous, and to the point. For your contacts, this message is all about doing maintenance on their contact list, something very few of them will really want to do, so don’t make them read anything that has nothing to do with the purpose of the message. Be sure to put that you’re changing your account in the subject line, and get to the details very early in the body of the message. Here’s an abridged template based on what I send:

From: {Old Address}
To: {New Address}
Bcc: {All Contacts}
Subject: I'm changing my email address, so please update your contact list - {Name}

To All Recipients:

On {Deadline}, my current email address, {Old Address}, will be abandoned. I will be permanently changing over to my new account, {New Address}, which you may or may not already have — please update your contact list, if necessary.

Thanks and regards,
{Name}

Do note the “From,” “To” and “Bcc” lines — these are set that way for a reason. You want to send the email from your old address, incase somebody has their account setup to mark anything from somebody not on their contact list as spam. “To” and “Bcc” are there so each recipient can see exactly two addresses on the email: theirs, and your new one — you want that new address to stick in their mind as much as possible until they get it into their contact list.

You may also wish to include a small note as to why you are switching, to head off the “why?” questions. Personally, I referenced the vast amount of spam I was receiving, and that some of their messages had been mistakenly sent to my Spam box months or weeks ago.

If you have any other accounts tied directly to an email address, this is a perfect opportunity to remind people to switch those as well. For instance: I included a reminder note to those that were on my Talk or Reader buddy lists to update those as well.

Switching Google Accounts: GMail

The process of importing your old email can take a long time. For me it ran for about three days, at a rate of about 200 messages every five minutes. I’ve put it up-front here because you can probably do all the other switchover's while it runs.

Copying Your Filters

If you’re like me, you’ve created a whole ton of filters to automatically label incoming messages from mailing lists, etc. — if you want all of the email you import from your old account to have these same labels, you’ll need to first copy over your filters before starting the import. This is a bit more involved, since the tool that allows you to export/import them is currently relegated to the realm of GMail Labs. On the Labs Settings page, find the one called “Filter import/export,” and enable it (be sure to scroll down to “Save” the settings).

With this lab enabled, you will find some new things at the bottom of the filters settings page: an “Export” button, and an “Import filters” link. To export, select all of the filters using the “Select All” link just above the Export button, and then click that button. When importing, it gives the option to not import certain filters, but I’ve been fairly good at deleting filters that no longer make sense (say, when I unsubscribe from something), so I just scrolled past it, and clicked the “Create filters” button.

Setting Your Old Account to Provide POP Access

GMail provides two ways to access your inbox from other applications, POP3 and IMAP, but it currently only supports downloading email from POP3. On the Forwarding and POP/IMAP settings, click the “Enable POP for All Mail,” and select “archive Gmail’s copy” from the drop-down — this will make it so that any email that you’ve imported into the new account will stop showing up in your old inbox, but will make sure you still have a copy incase something goes wrong (note: I’ve never had an issue, but I figure its better to be safe than sorry).

Importing Your Mail Into Your New Account

This is fairly simple. On the accounts settings page, click the “add a mail account you own” link under the “Get mail from other accounts” area. Type in your email address, and Gmail will find most of the right values (why doesn’t it know the right values when you’re trying to import from GMail?). Type in your old account’s password, change the POP Server to “pop.gmail.com.” You might also want to set it to add a label to all the incoming mail, so in the future when people or services email you on that account, you know about it and can correct the situation.

Copying Your Contacts

I use my GMail contact list as my go-to source of phone numbers, addresses, instant messenger ids, and other bits of information I’ve gathered on the people I know. I have phone numbers in there for people I have never, ever, called. I don’t know why. The point is, I’d be lost without this list

Exporting and importing your contact list is probably the easiest thing that we’ll be doing today — there are buttons for it, helpfully named “Export” and “Import,” right in the upper-right corner of the contacts panel. When exporting, be sure to select the “Everyone” and “Google CSV” options, those are the ones designed for copying between GMail accounts (it even says so next to the Google CSV option!).

Switching Google Accounts: Introduction

Why?

Over the years, my primary identity online has been “John Silicon,” a moniker I picked up as a tween that hasn’t left my side since. An almost uncountable number of people know me as Silicon — even a few people I first met offline still call me by my nom de plume. If you do a Google Search, you will find various Johns in Silicon Valley (none of whom are me), lyrics to a song that I maintain is a threat on my life, and a chronicle of my life on the internet.

As I’ve gotten older, I’ve started to move away from this pseudonym, more and more often typing “Alex Lyman” into the name field many a random website. But, even still, my email address has been John Silicon at whatever ISP I was using at the time. Most recently, for the last 4 years or so, I’ve been on GMail.

Now, as “John Silicon” has started to receive hundreds of spam messages a day (who knew a semi-fictional person could get a credit card?), I’ve decided to change my email address. This is not my first email switchover, and will probably not be my last, so I’ve decided to write a series of posts on the topic, as a guide to others who might find themselves in a similar mindset.

I have tied many of the other Google services I use to my John Silicon account: Reader, Code, Calendar, Docs, Talk, Groups, Analytics, Blogger, Orkut, Picasa, and many more of the others. Switching these over to a new account are, at the best of times, easy five-minute projects, and at the worst of times can be hellish, time-consuming nightmares that will take upwards of 10 whole minutes. If I have the time, I plan on signing up for some of the services I’ve never even had occasion to use (like Health), just to round out this series.

Creating A New Account

I will be switching from my GMail account to another GMail account, so I will just sign up for a new GMail account, which creates a new Google Account automatically. If you have an email account with another provider that you would like to switch to, you can sign up for a Google Account without a GMail address. Either way, Google has worked very hard to make it as simple to do as possible.