Trials and Tribulations – Moving from a 15 year old email Account

More cost cutting measures have moved me to decide to move from one of my trusty old email accounts to gmail account.  It is weird to think that if I jump ship from my old email address I will save a bunch of money each month AND I will get 4 times more Internet speeds.  Weird how those things work.  Of course, the ultimate in customer service, a small charge for email forwarding from a Internet provider is nowhere on the menu of services that are available to me.

What to change? – Getting a List Email Addresses

I considered just a cut and dry move, but then I thought of all the time I had spent at that email address and how many friends still had that address some where in their contacts lists.  I have had dear friends contact me after years of silence and the thought of this made me consider giving notifications a shot.  I also thought it would be the perfect opportunity for me to update my contact list, which was on my personal “things to do” list.  Luckily enough the tools I had used for much of my email, namely outlook made this a bunch easier.  I was able to run a script against my personal email folder and out came a list of a couple thousand email addresses, specifically an email address for ever address that had ever sent me email.  Very useful. 

Honestly, I didn’t look send the script through all of my emails (I obviously don’t keep them all), but once I saw the list and who was on it, I felt pretty certain I would have 99% of what I needed.  Good enough.

Splitting Addresses – Friends and Family, and Corporate

Once I had the master list of email addresses it was time to split those addresses into two, one list for friends and family, the other companies that I had done business with and had accounts with.  This was a little bit more manual. 

The script removed most of the duplicate addresses, but there were some.  After splitting the email addresses, I started to compare them to my Google contact list that I had begun last year, then I sent out my first spam emails to friends and family. 

The really nice thing about sending out an mass email is that you within minutes get a good list of those email addresses that are no longer good.  When I had started my list I had some friends that had no less than 7 or 8 email addresses associated them (I was feeling their pain).  Quickly this process weeded out those addresses that were no longer “live.”  Some copy pastes of those live email addresses to my Google contact list, and my friends and family contact list was update.  I clicked sync on my new Iphone and no sooner than those little buggers could transfer, I had a an matching contact list with Google and my iphone.  Very nice.  I have already gotten some emails from old friends I haven’t heard from in a while.  Even nicer.

Changing Corporate Web Sites

Web service accounts, businesses, web stores, etc. were my next task.  Where I wanted to keep in touch with most of my old friends and family, this large list of corporate email addresses represented a list of companies that I may or may not want to do business or receive spam from any more.  This time I had to be merciless in my scratching off the list, because each address left on the list was a web site or phone call I would have to make to update my email address.  This was is where the real work came in. 

Slowly going through the list and visiting web sites I no longer had any idea what the passwords were anymore became a slow process.  Once I had the new password, navigating some of the sites to find where they decided to put the “change email” option took some additional time.

The Last of the Corporate Sites

I still have a few more sites to decide on before I’m done.   I got most of the move done in about two days.  I have saved the phone call changes for business hours. 

Product Registration

I still haven’t figured out what I want to do about products I have purchased and registered under my old address.  Some companies don’t allow you to change them.  Conundrum there.

Having Multiple Accounts

The one saving grace I had was keeping multiple email accounts all those years.  I had one main account for my “serious and personal” emails and accounts, and one that I had for the somewhat spammy and stuff that I didn’t consider so important.  As most secondary accounts, mine became more of a primary account where I did lots of my email from. 

I am very happy that I didn’t have to move both email addresses.  Very happy.  Very very happy.

Did I say happy?

What did I learn from this?

Outlook was pretty darn useful.  The script saved me from a task that would have taken me hours, possibly days, of additional work.  Although I don’t plan to use Outlook in the future, I may consider it if I need to perform such a feet again (converting what ever mass of email over).  

Gmail account?  I have been playing with gmail for a while.  Some of the beta lab features for multiple email accounts are neat.  The worst part about gmail is where the email lives.   The pro of gmail is that it is not taking up space on my servers at home, and the con of gmail is that it is not taking up space on my servers at home.  I still have some philosophical questions to wrangle with.

There isn’t much you can do make the situation better in the case of moving email addresses, except for just walking away from them.  

Do you have any suggestions?