How to change email, address and mail account

Changing your email address can be as painful a step as changing your phone number, forcing us for a long time to check two addresses and to disclose the change to those who write or receive our mail regularly. In reality, even if there are sometimes limitations, the change of emails can be really painless, both if we want to keep only the new email address, and in case we want to keep both the old and the new service.
Who should change email is certainly who still uses the one designed when we were teenagers (with strange and improbable names!), Who uses the university one, who uses corporate email to communicate with friends or for social networks and also who uses services emails of national Internet providers, in our view however inferior to international services such as Outlook and Gmail.
So let's see how to change email, address or mail account in a few simple steps, within everyone's reach (even beginner users).

How to change email, address or mail account

To switch to a new email and take advantage of the power of Gmail or Outlook.com, with a new address or even keeping the old one (which is absolutely possible), you need to perform all the steps described in the chapters below, so you can do things right and avoid duplication or mistakes.

Create a new email with Gmail or Outlook

First we create a new email inbox on Gmail or Outlook; in both cases the creation of the new mailbox is free of charge and will take us very little time.

Once the page for creating a new account has been opened, we choose the new e-mail address using clear and legible names (our name and surname with the addition of the date of birth or other personal details are also fine), we choose the name of domain (on Outlook we can choose between Outlook.it, Outlook.com and Hotmail.com ), we choose the new access password and confirm the data on our identity, so as to personalize our new email.
In this regard, we invite you to read our guide on how to create an email address: best free email services for more details.

Import old emails into the new email service

After creating the new email account, we will have to import the old important emails, so as to make them available also on the new account. If we use an old mail account with IMAP support, the import is very simple:

• If we use Gmail as a new account, we open the main page of our new mailbox, click on the gear icon at the top right, click on Settings, go to the Account and import tab and then click on Import messages and contacts ; we insert the access data of our old email and wait for the import of all the messages and old contacts saved.
• If we use Outlook as a new account, we open the page of our new email box, we press the gear icon at the top right, we scroll the sidebar until we find the item View all Outlook settings, we press on Mail -> Sync email then click on Other email accounts . We insert the access credentials and, once the mail is synchronized, we post his emails inside the folders offered by Outlook.

If we use Outlook as a program on the PC (together with Office), we can also import the old emails managed on it by moving the PST file, as described in the official Outlook guide.

Set up automatic forwarding of messages from the old to the new mailbox

Now that the new mail account is set up and we have imported the old emails, we need to configure the old inbox to forward new emails to the new account, so that we don't have to go crazy between two, three or four different accounts. If the old accounts were based on Gmail and Outlook, the procedures to be used are the following:

• On the old Gmail we open the main page of our new mailbox, click on the gear icon at the top right, press on Settings, go to the Forwarding and POP / IMAP tab then press on Add forwarding address ; we insert the new address (Gmail or Outlook) and confirm, so as to immediately forward each new email to the new email box.
• On the old Outlook we open the page of our new email box, we press the gear icon at the top right, we scroll the sidebar until we find the item View all Outlook settings, we press on Mail -> Forwarding, we insert the code for two-factor authentication, apply the check mark under Enable forwarding and fill in the field Forward email to with the new email address.

If we have other proprietary mail services (such as the TIM email service, Alice, Fastweb or other operators), we personally check in the box settings whether it is possible to set up automatic forwarding or forwarding.

Send email with the old address to the new account

The new mailbox is practically ready, since we have imported all the messages and forwarded every new message from the old mailbox, so as to use only the new address to manage all the mail. The only setting left to configure provides the ability to use the old email address when we send a new message: in this way we can still reply with the old email from the new service, without having to open a dedicated webmail page each time (just use Gmail and Outlook for everything!).
To set up your old email address for sending new messages, we recommend following these steps:

• On Gmail, let's go back to the gear-shaped menu at the top right, press again on Settings, go to the Account and import tab, click on Add other email address in the Send message as field and enter the credentials of the old mail account ( with SMTP support). From now on we can choose which e-mail address to send new messages to, both during the writing phase and from the menu seen above.
• On Outlook, just repeat the steps already seen to import old emails: we open the page of our new email box, press the gear icon at the top right, scroll the sidebar until we find the item View all Outlook settings, press on Mail -> Synchronize e-mail then click on Other e-mail accounts .

To manage every aspect of the old email accounts on Gmail and Outlook, we can also add them as multiple mailboxes, as seen in our guides on how to Import and manage other Email accounts in Gmail with multiple mailboxes and how to Combine all Email addresses into one on Outlook.com .

Conclusions

After changing your e-mail address, all that remains is to update all social or personal accounts by accessing the various websites and changing the information on the e-mail account used to access the service; unfortunately this work cannot be automated and will have to be done one by one. All the operations we have shown you are also valid for the Gmail and Outlook mobile apps, both available for both Android and iOS / iPadOS.
If we also want to transfer the address book, we recommend you read our guide on how to import email addresses and contacts into Gmail, Yahoo Mail and Outlook .
In another guide, we showed you how to set up Gmail in Microsoft Outlook, Thunderbird and Windows 10 Mail, so as to use Gmail accounts on any computer in use.