New Email Address Questions

[Paul Saffold]

I used to have Frontier dialup. Horrible. I canceled it years ago. The email address I had with them is still active, though I use gmail.

[Derek Meyer]

Back when I first got DSL service (1994) the phone company did not offer internet/email service, so I went with a local provider for web/email. I still have that email address as my primary. I have to pay the $5 a month to keep it active, but I consider this acceptable, considering the work it would take me to change 30 years worth of accounts to a new email.

I signed up for an Outlook.com email address when it first went live, so my account became derekmeyer@outlook.com. No special characters or numbers needed. I thought that was pretty cool.

[Curt Harms]

Bruce
My email address is ronselzer@att.net, I have not had att service for around 14 years. See no reason to change anytime soon either.
Ron

I think Verizon did the same thing. I have a Verizon email address but it's actually AOL. AOL and Yahoo were owned by Verizon at one time then were spun off. Verizon shut down their email system and moved the users to AOL but the Verizon customers were able to keep their Verizon email address. I don't even know who owns them now. I do have one tale about AOL that left me shaking my head. SWMBO had a Verizon email address and for whatever reason couldn't get into it. We called AOL support and didn't get anywhere, even paid $4.95/Mo. for super duper support. We had to let them install remote control software and of course they only supported Windows. We gave them access to an old notebook with a Windows install that we never used. I watched what they did and it was nothing sophisticated. They pronounced the account inaccessible. We set her up with a 3rd party email. She didn't have many web sites that had email accounts attached so it was no big deal. 10 months later I got an email from AOL offering to help us with recovering her account. I told them they were a little late and declined their offer.

[Bill Howatt]

I didn't find it hard to switch people over to a different email address but the key is to start well ahead of the time you are losing the old email address. Couple of messages to the contacts and I put an address change note under my email signature.
Bit more pain if you don't change your email address on a site until the old email address is invalid. They often want to get a confirmation of email address change by sending you an email - and that email goes to the address you don't have anymore.
I have all my passwords, which means the sites I go to listed, in a password safe so going through and making changes was fairly easy but a bit time consuming. I didn't do a couple I mistakenly thought I'd never need which gave me the problem stated above.

[Andrew More]

I don't use the web interface so I may be missing where this shows up, but I've never seen an ad of any kind associated with Gmail, much less a targeted one.
If I need to keep something confidential I certainly wouldn't put it into an email, no matter the provider. One-on-one conversation with a mask on, in a huge open area outdoors, adjacent to a roaring waterfall might be OK.

I guess I need to be a bit clearer. Google's business is selling ads, everything else that it does is in service or defense of this business. I'm certain that they have their crawlers going through your email and using that to generate ads in other parts of the web, even if they don't serve them up in GMail. Honestly, it would almost be better if they did, because then other companies without their monopoly could do the same, and make money with just email.

I also think most people underestimate just how much information can be gleamed by going through things like email, or their garbage. In Google's case it doesn't even need to be anything confidential, since they just want to sell better targetted ads. So the emails you got from buy stuff from Lee Valley, the receipts from the big box store, the bills from your credit card company are all pretty valuable to them.

[Brian Elfert]

I got my own domain name after I was told I was going to lose my email address back around 2010. I didn't want to go through having to change my email address again. Google was offering their Google Apps offering for free for 10 users so I did that. Unfortunately, a bit over year ago they announced they would start charging for the service. I pay $9 per month right now and it goes to $18 per month in November. This is for three accounts. I decided it is worth $6 per month per email to keep it.