[Waterluvian]

Good advice. I assume I can forward my Gmail because that address has been my address for as long as gmail has existed. This is just like cell numbers. You attach one to everything in your life and transitioning is near impossible. Glad the government forced free number transfer. If only emails worked the same way.

[cdubzzz]

I had a bit of concern about this as well when I moved off Gmail after 12 years. I did not import my mail in to my new service (ProtonMail) and can really only recall one or two times I’ve had to look at the Gmail archive in the past two years.

I think that, similar to cell phone numbers, people get very attached to these contact points and changing them creates anxiety. I happen to have changed both email address and phone number (after five years) recently and I think it makes sense to do once in a while. Otherwise these things become seemingly permenant identifiers and I have enough of those already (:

[zwkrt]

I recently moved email out of Google and it was surprisingly easy to migrate most services to the new address. The tricky ones are the email-as-username services.

[peatmoss]

Yes, I’d forward emails until you can get everyone trained over to using your new email address. I’ve done that in the past with mostly inactive emails that I got through professional or academic associations. Presumably Gmail still makes auto-forwarding reasonably easy.

[distances]

Why not just leave the forwarding on? I still have my first e-mail address from the 90s forwarding all incoming mail to my current one, though it's very rare by now that anything comes.

[peatmoss]

You could! The only reason not to is if you wanted to close the account for some reason.