Helping people with computers... one answer at a time.
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Changing email addresses can be a real pain, and this is one of the reasons why. Be it on a web page that you can't update, or in the address books of all your friends and family, you know that someone will try to use your old email address long after you've switched it. A forwarding service would certainly be nice.
Yep. It'd certainly be nice.
But in general, while it's possible, it's not very likely, or it's going to cost you.
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When email gets sent to "someaddress@example.com", the "someaddress" part is ignored by everyone except for the mail servers at "example.com". Every mail server that isn't "example.com" simply looks at the email and says, in effect, "oh, this needs to go to example.com", and sends it there.
It's not until the mail actually gets to the servers at "example.com" that the individual email recipient is examined, and the appropriate mailbox is found, or other action taken.
The upshot is this: if forwarding is to be done, it must be done by your old ISP. No matter what, they're going to get all the email sent to your old address since it's "at" their domain. Only they can then forward it.
The problem is twofold: first, many ISPs and mail servers simply don't provide an email forwarding service. Hotmail is a good example. You can't close a Hotmail account and ask for all email that might come in on that account to be forwarded to some other email address.
Second, for those that do support it, it basically means keeping your old account open so that it can receive, and then forward, your email. Keeping it open, of course, implies that it might cost you some amount per month.
There are various email forwarding services out there, but they basically take the later approach: you give them enough information for them to keep your old account open, and they manage the forwarding process for you. I typically don't recommend them - if you're going to keep your old account open anyway, why involve someone else?
What I do recommend is owning your own domain, and using email addresses on that domain. When you purchase a domain name, most domain registrars will allow you to specify email addresses to be forwarded, and where they might forward to. So, let's say you purchase the domain "joe-example.info". When you register your domain, you can then set up the email address "joe@joe-example.info" to forward wherever you like ... your Hotmail account, your ISP-based email account, or whatever. You would also configure your email program to send from "joe@joe-example.info". Then, when you change from Hotmail to GMail, or from one ISP to another, you simply reconfigure the forwarding to the new service. Everyone using your public email address, "joe@joe-example.info", sees no difference, and all your email arrives at your new service.
Article C2403 - August 14, 2005
I have an old E-mail address {email address removed}. I stopped using it some time ago (2008). Telcel was bought by Movistar.
Posted by: Francisco Arevalo at February 11, 2011 6:28 PMSome people is sending messages to the old E-mail right now. Is it possible to recover them?
Thanks and Regards
Francisco
i am not happy about this because i need to communicate with family and friends
Posted by: chinyama mwananguluma at May 20, 2011 5:08 AMMy first email address is *********@cs.com (compuserve)This is where most of my email goes to. Right now, compuserve charges me 4.95 a month for this email address. I no longer use compuserve to access the internet, and switched to verizon to connect to the internet. I also have a gmail address which is free. I want to drop compuserve all together and just use gmail. I need to make sure any mail that may still go to compuserve will forward to gmail. Right now I have it set up for everything that goes to c.serve to be forwarded to gmail, but as I said it is costing me 4.95 a month to do so. Until I can notify everyone of my switch to the gmail address, how can I get any last emails that may happen to go to the c.serve address once I drop c.serve?
19-Aug-2011
Posted by: Debbie at August 16, 2011 7:00 AM
my old email address was locked dont know why cant access,old address can you tell me how to get my information pictures and etc.it was a yahoo address
Posted by: Donald McDonald at December 2, 2011 1:49 PM@Donald
Posted by: Wayne Talmadge at December 2, 2011 4:58 PMThis article, already on Ask Leo! has some good ideas for
recovering accounts.
Recover email account