Things to remember when switching ISPs
It’s not very common for people to switch ISPs on a whim. Once you’re locked into an ISP in your area, it could be time consuming and costly to switch. It wasn’t until I recently switched from Comcast to Verizon that I realized how many services and web sites I signed up with my Comcast email address, and if I’m going to get rid of Comcast, I’m going to have to change my email address on all of them. The biggest reason for doing so is password recovery. If you forget your password, it’s generally emailed to you. However, when you drop your ISP, you no longer have access to that email account, making password recovery difficult, if not impossible.
This happened to me recently when I tried to recover my ICQ account. I don’t know why, but my ICQ password wasn’t working on it anymore. Even the apps that worked just a few months ago and had my password saved wouldn’t work. I know I didn’t update it, and it wasn’t hacked since my old email address was still attached to it, but ICQ wasn’t helpful in getting me access to my own account back. Since the email address was no longer accessible, I was shut out of my ICQ account with no chance of recovery.
Imagine what that would be like if you didn’t change your email addresses on everything you signed up for. Being shut out of everything could do some serious damage to you if you depend on services to get work done, or if you’ve been hacked and need to have your new password sent to you. What’s worse is that some services send emails stating that someone attempted to recover a password on your account. You would never get those emails.
<strong>Getting started</strong>
If you don’t do it already, save your emails. I have emails going as far back as 1988 and every now and then there’s something in them which I need to reference. If you’ve had your ISP for a long time, chances are you used it to sign up on quite a few sites. Hotmail was big early on, but came infected with spam messages and I stopped using it. Now everyone’s using Gmail as a free alternative to their ISP’s email, and you’re not locked in to your ISP to handle email.
In order to get an idea of all the emails I got when I signed up for web sites and services, I did a search in my Comcast folder for the subject “Welcome to”. It brought up a good number of emails which represent most of the important sites I signed up with dating all the way back to 2001. Every single one of those web sites will have to be updated with a different email address. Other phrases to search for are “Thank you”, “registering”, and “invite”.
<strong>Choose where to move to</strong>
As I hinted at before, the most obvious thing to do would be to move your email address to something that’s not tied to an ISP. You can use Gmail, MobileMe, Hotmail, Live.com, or any other email service that you won’t have to worry about changing if you move to a different ISP in the future. Even if you don’t plan on changing your ISP where you live, you could move, forcing you to do this all over again.
As I spent the better part of the afternoon changing email addresses, I found that there were a lot of sites that never once sent me a welcome email. Those were the hard ones to remember since I don’t have an actual trail of emails to look for. I had to scroll down my list of emails and look at some of the newsletters I got to remember that I signed up for a particular web site. I would suppose that the best thing I could have done to alleviate that would be to create more folders for sites than I already had. Some sites were important, but didn’t send enough emails to warrant a whole folder dedicated to it.
<strong>Update your filters</strong>
Once you change your email address, you may need to remake filters depending on your email software you use. If you attach a filter to a specific incoming email address, you may need to change which incoming email address to attach it to. I try not to be that specific with my filters so that they can go wherever they need to, but the downside is that I put them in subfolders based on the email address they came in from which would have to be changed.
<strong>What to do after</strong>
When you think you have all your email addresses changed over, you may want to hold off on canceling your old ISP’s internet for a few days. Keep checking your old email address and see if any stragglers come in that you might have forgotten about. Also, ask your ISP how long that internet address is good for. Chances are they’ll shut it down immediately, but some may let it run until the end of the billing cycle.
There are some advantages to keeping your email off your ISP. Comcast never supported IMAP which annoyed me. I don’t know if Verizon does because right now they won’t allow me to change my email name; it’s currently a string of random characters and they can’t tell me why I can’t change it when the site clearly tells me I can. I’m also not a fan of keeping everything in one basket. I split my emails between different accounts so that if I lose access to one, I don’t lose access to everything.
Email management can be a hassle, but if you future proof its organization, it can save you a lot of hassle in the future.
Category: How-Tos, Technology
