Retiring an email address, especially one you’ve used for a decade or more, can be a tedious process and may take six months to complete. So, be patient with yourself if you choose to take this on.

You might arrive on this path because your email is rife with spam, connects slowly or inconsistently, represents a name or identity that is no longer yours, or is on a domain that a provider is retiring. I’ve seen this with Yahoo, AOL, Gmail, and ISP-provided accounts, respectively.

The initial steps outlined below cover the 3–5 primary considerations and actions to take to let go of an old address while continuing to receive email from those you still want to hear. You can complete them in any order or series of phases.

Notify Your Contacts

Review your contacts and/or the email messages you’ve sent or received in correspondence with people you know. This might also be a good opportunity to clean up your contacts.

Send a message from your old address to 50 contacts at a time. Put your new address in CC and Reply-To and the rest of your recipients in BCC. (If Reply-To is not shown and you use Mail, add it via the View menu or press Command+Option+R.)

In the body, share the new address and your impetus to change. Ask folks to update your card in their contacts and remove your old address from the previous recipients or collected addresses list in their email system.

If you use Apple Mail, you can select one of these messages after sending it and use the Message > Send Again command (Shift+Command+D) to create a new draft where you only need to change the recipients.

Additionally, when personal contacts email you at your old address, reply to them from your new address.

Update Online Accounts

Do you know what websites have an online account for you on file with your old email address? If you have all of your logins stored in one place, such as 1Password, iCloud Keychain, or another password manager, you can search for your address to find (most of) them.

This step requires a lot of patience, because each website is designed differently. You might know this already if you’ve recently changed your passwords to increase your Internet security.

Navigate each site to your account profile or settings and seek out a way to edit your email address and/or username with the new one. In some cases, you will need to contact the provider to request this change.

Change Subscription Profiles

Explore the messages you receive from entities to whose newsletters and other email lists you’ve subscribed. For those you wish to continue receiving, look for a link, usually at the bottom, to update your profile. Some subscriptions may require you to unsubscribe your old address and then subscribe your new address.

This might be an opportunity to identify subscriptions you no longer want and unsubscribe from them, but you need not do so immediately. You will stop receiving these emails when you eventually delete your old address and all messages to it bounce back to senders.

Set Auto Reply

After you’ve resolved online accounts and subscriptions as above, if you can still access your old email settings (usually in webmail, on a website), you may want to set an auto-reply. You’ll usually find this as “autoresponder,” “vacation reply,” or as part of email “rules” or “filters.”

This will notify any remaining senders to your old address about how to reach you at your new address. Preferably, you will only have this triggered on messages that land in your inbox, not in junk/spam.

New Domain Email

If your new email address is on a new domain you have recently registered, the domain might get flagged as potentially fraudulent. Hopefully, this is something your email hosting provider can resolve, possibly using a DMARC policy in tandem with SPF and DKIM records.

If you hear from contacts that they don’t receive emails sent from your new address, but you aren’t receiving notices of delivery failure, reach out to your host (or to me) for guidance. I can help you locate the appropriate settings or correspond with your host about how to resolve the issue.

While you are in or preparing for the process of retiring an email address, you may want to consider designing a way to differentiate among emails sent to various addresses or received in various accounts. For example, you can use a rule in Mail to change the background color of messages so you can tell them apart based on the account or email address that received them.

You can also have email to the old address automatically forwarded to the new one, potentially forcing you to reply from the new address instead. On the receiving end, for example, a rule or filter could look for and act on only messages sent to the old address and received at the new address.

Finally, review your old email account for messages you want to keep and move or copy them to a mailbox in Mail’s On My Mac or in any other email account where you have capacity. If there are thousands, do this in chunks and be prepared to wait patiently while these operations proceed. You can monitor the bottom of the Mailboxes sidebar for the status of the current transfer.

If all of this is overwhelmingly difficult for you or feels too misaligned with your tech savvy, you might be wise to hire a personal assistant or tech support person to handle the process for you.

If, however, you think you might be able to do it on your own, you can always reach out to me for some hand-holding and coaching to become comfortable with the process.