Not that hard. Get new email, autoforward old email to new. In old email, set reply-to as new email.
After suitable time has elapsed, disable old email.
It would require systematically changing my email at the 300+ sites I’m aware of, assuming they allow that, or deleting the account if they allow that. I’ve been making efforts here and it’s painful. Many companies don’t have good systems for that, if any at all. Even big companies like Amazon and Sony, I was told to just abandon old accounts and let them hang out there forever… I had duplicate Audible and PlayStation accounts. No way to delete them. I found this particularly upsetting with Sony, considering how many times they’ve been hacked. On some sites I also ended up in captcha purgatory.
Then there are the hundreds more who have my email somewhere. I tied to change my email 13 years ago. My own mother still sends to my old gmail account. I think she used the new one a few times, but do I really want to nag my 70 year old mother about using the wrong address? My dad is the only one who reliably uses it, because he uses his contacts app properly. Over a decade and the progress has been almost non-existent. All this effort did was make email and logins harder to manage by spreading it out.
The pragmatic approach is to go back to Gmail, since most stuff is still there. I don’t want to be in bed with Google, but at least it’s only one thing to think about.
Thinking about it, my Gmail account is also my Apple ID. I think Apple only recently made an option available to change that, but it feels risky.
My main Amazon account has all the Audible stuff I actually care about, as well as copies of the stuff on my legacy account, so I wouldn’t lose anything that mattered if they deleted it.
My goal was to delete the legacy account and all my personal data related to it (which I believe is required by law in some places).
I ended up on the phone with support and talked to them for quite a while. They said there was nothing that could be done. This was probably a year ago, Best I could do I guess is delete as much as I can, if they allow it, change the email to a 10 minute email, and then let it go. This is what I had to do for Papa John’s last week and a couple other places, but I’d rather my account actually be deleted so I don’t have to worry about a future data breach on an account I would no longer be able to get into. I don’t know how their database is setup, if I change something I can see, is it actually gone or does the DB keep a history? There are a lot of unknowns that make me uncomfortable with just abandoning an account.
With Sony it was worse. At least Amazon talked to me. Similar situation with 2 accounts. Their website said to call to have your account deleted. I called, waited on hold for 40 minutes, then was told they couldn’t do it. They hung up on me while I was trying to tell them their website said to call the number.
This past weekend I migrated out of 1Password, which I had been using for 18 years. That was a fairly big job. The export/import did OK, but I still had to go one-by-one through 600+ entires to sure things up and fix little things. The main job is done, but I have a little more I’d like to do. The email job is bigger and has lots of other people involved, which is where the real challenge is, as they’re all different.
Yes, this can seem overwhelming. That's where the auto-forward helps. This is what I did: initially changed emails at the big ones - banks, govt, etc., maybe 10 or so. For the rest, when an email would come in, I would change it for just that one. It distributes the workload over time and is much more manageable.
> I tied to change my email 13 years ago. My own mother still sends to my old gmail account
This is where the reply-to setting becomes important - most email clients will use the reply-to when responding. For persistent ones, go into, say Mom's contacts, and update the email there, deleting the old one. Had to do this with my parents and family. Don't make them do it, do it yourself.
How to set reply-to: go to Settings > Accounts and Import, click "edit info" next to your email address in the "Send mail as" section, select "Specify a different 'reply-to' address" in the pop-up and enter the desired email.
I am almost sure that you only use 15 of those sites regularly, 30 of those sites occasionally, and almost never for the other 250.
It's doable. If you keep finding excuses, you'll never get it done.
