How do I change my email address without losing everything?

Your email address is the recovery route for almost everything you own online. Changing it is a project rather than a task, and the failure mode is being locked out of an account years later.

Step by step

1. Choose a new address you will not need to change again.Prefer a provider you do not get through an employer, a broadband contract or a phone network — those addresses disappear when you switch supplier, which is the usual reason people are doing this.
2. Set up the new address and secure it first.Strong unique password, two-factor authentication, recovery codes printed. This account will become the key to everything else, so it gets the strongest protection you have.
3. Forward the old address to the new one.Do not redirect blindly and stop reading the old mailbox — check it directly as well, because some senders and some forwarding rules fail silently.
4. Find every account using the old address.Search the old mailbox for 'welcome', 'verify your email', 'your receipt' and 'subscription'. That surfaces accounts you have forgotten, which is most of them.
5. Update in order of consequence.Banks, pensions and anything holding money first. Then government services, utilities, insurance and your phone and broadband. Then shopping, streaming and social. Then everything else.
6. Update the recovery address on other accounts too.Many accounts hold a separate recovery email. Changing the sign-in address does not change that, and it is exactly what you will need when something goes wrong.
7. Tell people, once and clearly.A short message to your contacts, plus an auto-reply on the old address for a few months saying the new one. Do not send it repeatedly.
8. Keep the old mailbox alive for at least a year.Renewals, annual statements and tax correspondence appear once a year. Closing early is how accounts get orphaned.
9. Export the old mail before closing anything.Every provider offers an export. Keep the archive with your documents; old correspondence is occasionally needed for warranties, disputes and tax.

Tips

• Do not let a provider recycle the old address. Some free providers reuse abandoned addresses, which means someone else can eventually receive your password resets.
• Consider using aliases at the new provider — a different alias per service makes it obvious later who sold your address.
• Do the work in sessions of thirty minutes over a couple of weeks. Attempting it in one evening is how accounts get missed.

Common mistakes

• Closing the old address once the obvious accounts are moved — The accounts you forget are annual ones. Losing access to the old address means losing the reset route for them permanently.
• Using an address tied to a broadband or mobile provider — It stops working when you switch supplier, which forces this whole exercise again at the worst possible moment.

If it doesn't work

Questions people ask