ISP email address

Chomeur

I have a blueyonder email address with Virgin Media. VM are now charging about twice as much for broadband as I would be paying with g.network, who have recently become available for me to use. But I understand that I would not be able to take my email address with me if I switch. How much trouble would it be for me to change my email address? I suppose I have about 200 online accounts. So I can probably notify each of those providers of a new email address within a minute. It could be done. Any thoughts?

matelodave

I changed to a generic, non ISP e-mail address 20 years ago because of the problems when changing ISP's. VM may allow you to retain the e-mail address and some ISP also allow it but most of them now levy a charge for the privilige.

AFAIK It's not ever so easy to implement a global e-mail address change (unless others know different) so you'll have to notify all your contacts and accounts individually.

onomatopoeia99

I lost my ISP email address I had since 1994 last year and it's a complete pain in the bum.  Back then there weren't non-ISP options available and by the time there were, too many people had my address for me to want the hassle involved to change it.

I'm still finding accounts I rarely used where I forgot to change the address.

Neil_Jones

Chomeur said:

I have a blueyonder email address with Virgin Media. VM are now charging about twice as much for broadband as I would be paying with g.network, who have recently become available for me to use. But I understand that I would not be able to take my email address with me if I switch. How much trouble would it be for me to change my email address? I suppose I have about 200 online accounts. So I can probably notify each of those providers of a new email address within a minute. It could be done. Any thoughts?

Set up Gmail/Yahoo/Outlook and use it to pull in your Blueyonder email.  Then when you terminate your Virgin Media, it'll (the Blueyonder) will just stop working.  But by that point you should have made contact with everybody you need to and changed all the emails of the providers you use.

However you will almost certainly find accounts with forums, blogs, providers, whatever else that you haven't used in a month of Sundays so you'll do well to get them all.

Mickey666

onomatopoeia99 said:

I lost my ISP email address I had since 1994 last year and it's a complete pain in the bum.  Back then there weren't non-ISP options available and by the time there were, too many people had my address for me to want the hassle involved to change it.

I'm still finding accounts I rarely used where I forgot to change the address.

What's so difficult about sending out a 'change of address' email to all your contacts?
As for rarely used accounts . . . that's precisely why changing email addresses is not a big deal.  I still occasionally find an old online account I've not used in years, typically for online shopping, and can no longer login . . . in which case I simply set up a new account with them using my latest email address. 

It's really not an issue.  In fact, in my experience it's a lot easier than having to notify lots of institutions about a physical change of address when moving house, because those notifications are generally mandatory and often subject to penalties if not informed, whereas notification of a change of email address is never mandatory (as far as I'm aware).

Neil_Jones

Plus of course the great GDPR clean-out where every company known to man or beast that did email notifications or forum logins or whatever else sent "do you want to remain subscribed to/part of <some site/blog/newsletter that you don't even remember signing up for in the first place years ago?  Click here if you do, otherwise we'll purge you from our system by the end of next month" type emails back in 2019 I think it was.  So that being the case, a large chunk of your online forum/profile log-ins probably don't work now anyway if you haven't used them in a significant while.

Chomeur

Thanks. Any suggestion as to what sort of new email address I should get? The four email addresses that I have all seem to fall under one of the headings here - https://www.thedailymash.co.uk/news/science-technology/blueyonder-old-as-!!!!!!-gmail-dull-as-fk-what-your-email-address-says-about-you-20210526208507!

Neil_Jones

The Daily Mash is a satirical website which publishes spoof articles, i.e. it is all made-up and is not intended, in any way whatsoever, to be taken as factual" - about page.

Just pick a sensible email address that doesn't like a teenager made it and it'll be fine."littlehottie83" probably isn't a good one.  "pjchapman" may be better.

Chomeur

It would seem to be quite a good position to be in to have the cabling for both services. Then I am in a much stronger position to negotiate over price rises. In particular Virgin seem to let you have their new joiner rates if you've been away for a year, so that would be quite a saving.

Chomeur

Neil_Jones said:

The Daily Mash is a satirical website which publishes spoof articles, i.e. it is all made-up and is not intended, in any way whatsoever, to be taken as factual" - about page.

Just pick a sensible email address that doesn't like a teenager made it and it'll be fine."littlehottie83" probably isn't a good one.  "pjchapman" may be better.

Many a true word is spoken in jest. I was thinking more about what service is a good one to use rather than my name in the first part of it.

Neil_Jones

Chomeur said:

Neil_Jones said:

The Daily Mash is a satirical website which publishes spoof articles, i.e. it is all made-up and is not intended, in any way whatsoever, to be taken as factual" - about page.

Just pick a sensible email address that doesn't like a teenager made it and it'll be fine."littlehottie83" probably isn't a good one.  "pjchapman" may be better.

Many a true word is spoken in jest. I was thinking more about what service is a good one to use rather than my name in the first part of it.

They're all the same, just pick Yahoo, Gmail or Outlook and have done with it.