Liberate Yourself from Old Email Addresses [How To]

Source: http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/lifehacker/full/~3/eHfk89FY-eg/liberate-yourself-from-old-email-addresses

If you've been on the internet for any substantial amount of time you've likely accumulated your fair share of email addresses. Old school addresses, an assortment of free web-based addresses from Hotmail and Yahoo, and so on all contribute to you having too many addresses and little desire to keep checking the old ones. What can you do to cut down on your email excess? Wired Magazine has a how-to guide to help you consolidate your past email addresses without simply abandoning them into the digital void.

In other words, you are a slave to an e-mail address that you don't want or which makes you use an interface that sucks. You can't give it up because thousands of your close personal friends only know you as ClassOf92@aol.com or ILoveNKOTB@hotmail.com. A blind switch to a new e-mail address is out of the question — you probably don't even know everyone who has the old one, and grandma wouldn't understand anyway.

The guide details how to set up a new email service, they use the robust GMail, and properly configure it to take in email from the old addresses and notify the people still using them of your current address. Taking a page from Gina's Future Proofing Your Email playbook, they suggest registering a domain name to keep a permanent address even as the services you use change over time. For more tips on wrangling multiple email accounts with GMail, check out how to consolidate multiple email addresses with GMail.

Ditch Your Old E-Mail Addresses [Wired]