Cancelling An E Mail Address

[jw47]

How do you cancel an E Mail address if you are changing Broadband providers.

[Buenchico]

First get yourself a free email account with a reliable third-party provider. (i.e. DON'T use your new ISP's email service or you'll be faced with the same problem again if you change your ISP in the future). I recommend using GMX:
https://www.gmx.co.uk

Log into your 'old' email account using your web browser on a PC. (i.e. not, say, via an Android phone app). Look for an option to export your contacts list. (Post a question here if you can't find it, telling us who your 'old' ISP is). If you're offered a choice of format, choose '.csv'. Save the exported file onto your hard drive.

Exit your 'old' account and log into your 'new' one (with GMX or whatever). Look for an option to import your contacts list. (With GMX it's via a wrench icon in 'Contacts'). Navigate to the location of the file you exported from your old account, click on it and import it.

You'll then have all of your old contacts available to you in your new account. Send an email to everyone in your contacts list, notifying them of your new address.

Then use the 'mail collector' facility in your new account to get any mail addressed to your old account automatically forwarded to your new one.

ISPs vary in their policies regarding the email accounts of departing customers. Some simply switch off the service immediately (in which case any mail sent to an old address will just be 'bounced' back to the sender) but most allow a short period of time whereby incoming mail can still be accessed (or, more importantly here, forwarded to a new account). The account will hen be closed by the old ISP. (i.e. you don't need to do anything yourself).

[jw47]

My sister is with Supanet and changing to EE, The man in EE shop said she will have to pay approx. £60 a year if she keeps supanet e mail address. As she only gets Junk from them as most of her contacts she goes through facebook with, she wants to cancel the supanet address, I have looked on her e mail page but can.t see how to do it, we may have to phone them any help for two old ladies would be appreciated

[Buenchico]

You can't 'cancel' an email address. All you can do is to abandon the account. Your sister should simply stop using the Supanet account (and reject any offer to keep it open by paying a fee).

Your sister should still get an account with a third-party provider though. (i.e. NOT with EE). My recommendation to use GMX still holds true.

[fender62]

gmx are superb as Buenchico says, also gmail, outlook.com

[jw47]

She already had a G Mail account so I have reactivated this for her. She only gets advertising or junk e mails from Supanet so after the change over date if she just dosn.t use supanet anymore will it then be discarded, she is concerned they will charge her via direct debit, can.t cancel this until final bill has come from supanet.hope this make sesne

[Buenchico]

Supanet have no authorisation to take any money from your sister's account after she leaves them. Only a tiny minority of people pay to retain an old email address, so Supanet certainly wouldn't regard that as being something that they'd take payment for automatically. She's protected by the Direct Debit Guarantee anyway, so she can simply cancel the direct debit:
https://www.directdebit.co.uk/DirectDebitExplained/pages/directdebitguarantee.aspx

[jw47]

Thanks Buenchico for all info, it has helped a lot.

[KARL]

Not wanting to seem awkward to Chris, but one cannot rely on mail sent to an old/defunct e-mail address being "bounced". I stopped paying for and using two or three BT addresses more than a decade ago - I assumed my incoming mail to those addresses would be bounced, but oh no. The result is that people who had not been in touch for some time, failed to note the change of address, or whatever will have been sending me mail and presumably thinking I was ignoring them when they got no reaction from me. I criticised BT for this on AB and was told not to be so silly, this was a standard situation and a sensible security measure - I could not see how it could be. I can still do a test transmission to these addresses - the message goes out but no delivery failure shows up, the transmission shows every sign of having been successful and, by implication that the addresses are active, the mail is/was received and (fair assumption) read. When I transmit a message to an address I am 99.9% certain does not exist at that host, the same happens.

[1581960]

Hi Buenchico, I'm thinking of leaving BT (too expensive) so in the same position as jw47. A friend of mine changed his email to a gmail account some time ago and it has caused a few minor problems, especially when I send him more than one email in a day, he doesn't seem able to find them both. I assume they are somehow embedded in each other and only one shows up. You have recommended gmx, is this scenario less likely with gmx than gmail?
Your help is always appreciated, many thanks.

[Buenchico]

Karl:
Have you tried using the 'mail collector' facility (from your current email provider) to get mail sent to your old BT address forwarded to your new one? If it's not being bounced by BT's server it might be possible to access it in that way.

1581960:
That problem with Gmail is a new one to me, so I can't really comment on why it's happening or whether it might still happen elsewhere.

Gmail is a decent enough service (particularly now that Google has stopped electronically scanning everyone's mail in order to decide which ads to serve up to them) but I find it far less intuitive than GMX, which I definitely prefer.

I've been recommending GMX here on AB for several years and it seems to be building up quite a fanbase among AB members. It's operated by one of the world's major internet companies (1 & 1) so, unlike some lesser known email providers, it's not likely to disappear suddenly. It's a leading email provider across much of Europe (especially in Germany, where it's based) but it still seems to be relatively little known here in the UK.

[Tuvok]

Look in the settings of Gmail for conversation view and turn it off.

Conversation view will link all messages with the same subject from the same sender into one email.

eg. You send message called duck

Recipient replys - the message will be re. duck

etc.

Later on you get another message and its called duck again but has nothing to do with the first duck message, but it will be tagged on to the first duck message!

With conversation view off these emails will appear as separate emails.

[1581960]

Thanks Buenchico, Thanks Tuvok.
Brilliant info.