Tag Archives: email

Perhaps it’s time to Change your Email Address

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There are lots of reasons someone may want to change their email address. The most prominent reasons is that you’re using an email Service that is no longer getting good support or you’re changing your Internet service provider and had previously been using an email provided by that provider. Regardless of why you want to change your email address, the process all goes just about the same.  If you are currently using an email address provided by your service provider, or if you’re using one of the old Internet addresses from companies like AOL or yahoo, these are all email addresses that probably need to be changed to something more stable.

The first thing you need to do is create a new email address. There are lots of good email providers out there and you can choose from any of them. I typically recommend using Google or outlook as your new email address as those are both from companies that will probably be around for a long time to come . Once you’ve created the new email, you’ll need to set it up so that all your devices have access to it and  then use your old email address to verify that everything works by sending yourself an email and verifying you receive it on all your devices.

Next comes to the hard part. You have to make sure that people know it’s your new address. If your previous email address still works, you can look through it for email that you’ve received from people, and companies, that you want to continue to get email from.

I typically look at email in three separate categories:

  1. Email from friends or businesses that you consider critical.
  2. Email that you’ve signed up for.  This can typically be things like businesses or grocery stores that you’ve given your email address so that you can get coupons or sale information from. It may also be newsletters that you’ve signed up for about subjects that you have interest in.
  3. Email that you never signed up for and really don’t care that you get. Many people call this spam, but regardless of what you call it you really don’t care about it and for purposes of changing your email, you don’t want these people to have your new email address. That way this spam will stop coming in.

Of these three categories, only two need to be dealt with. We’re gonna start off by looking at group 2. These emails are typically things that you’ve signed up for, and you enjoy getting, so you wanna make sure they get your new email address. Rather than going through the process of trying to change your email for these accounts, typically the best way is to just re-sign up for these emails. If it’s an email newsletter or list, sign back up again with your new email. If it’s email from particular company, sign up there with your new email or give your email when you’re checking out at a store so that they can re-sign you up using your new email. These are easy. These can happen overtime because these are not critical.

The primary work involved in changing your email has to do with the category 1 people. These are typically businesses, governments, utility companies, credit card, companies, and friends that you want to have your new email. Let’s look at each of these types separately.

Start off by making a list of businesses and organizations. You know that you get email from. From that list you can check them off as you get them done. Many times if you still have access to your existing email, scrolling through past emails will give you an idea of some of the ones you need to get changed.

Financial

Businesses or companies that have a financial connection to you need to be some of the first ones that you change.  Banks often have a process for changing your email address. If your bank is local, the easiest way to change your email addresses go to the bank and take your ID. If you don’t have a local bank, then usually they have a process for you to go through to make a change to your email address on your account. You’ll need to call them and work this out with them individually.

While we’re talking about calling someone, never look up the phone number for these types of institutions on the Internet. It’s just too easy for people to redirect you to the wrong phone number trying to impersonate your facility. Look up the phone number typically on a bill or statement if they will have sent you. This applies to all of these types of businesses you need to change your address with.

For brokerage account, if you have a personal relationship with your broker, you can probably just call them. If you don’t, you’ll need to call the number on your account statement and explain to them that you want to change your email address. They’ll walk you through their process.

If you are retired, you’ll obviously need to let Social Security know your new email address. They have a process for doing that once you login to their site. If you get retirement from another method, you’ll have to let those retirement systems know your new email address also. Many times you can do this over the phone.

Businesses and credit cards

Use your statements that you get from businesses or credit card companies to give you phone numbers to contact them to change your email address. Each one of these will have a different process to go through. In fact, it’s kind of frustrating sometimes. Some are very easy and some make you jump through a lot of hoops. But you’ll need to contact each one of those and get each one of those changed.

Same thing with utility companies. In fact, any company that you get a bill from by email or a receipt from my email is gonna have to get your new email address. Work through each one individually, and make sure you give yourself plenty of time to make these changes.

Friends

Letting all your friends know your new email is probably the easiest thing to do. Start in your new email account, and send a email describing the fact that you’re changing your email address. Just make it short and sweet. Tell them that you’re changing your email address to the new email address and from now on you’d like for them to use this.

You can do this all in one email if you write the email that you want to send, and then use the blind carbon copy function (BCC) in your email client to send the same email to each person all at once. Just add them all to the BCC list and when they get the email it looks like they’re all getting an individual email from you.

Be sure you allow time to get this to happen. Hopefully you’re making your email address change while you still have access to your old email account. This way you can watch emails quit coming into your old account and start coming into your new one and keep track of ones that haven’t made the change yet so that you may need to re-notify them.

If you’ve already lost access to your old account, then it’s basically starting over. It’ll take quite a while before you get all these things changed, but once they do get changed, you can give solace to the fact that you’re at least using a reputable company for your email address. These companies will likely be in business for quite a while and hopefully you’ll never have to go through this process again.

Outlook sends attachments as Winmail.dat

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imageQ: Many of my colleagues tell me that when I send them a PDF file as it comes to them as a file called winmail.dat. They try to open it but are never successful in being able to see the PDF.  What are they doing wrong?

A:  it’s very likely they’re not doing anything wrong. It’s quite possible your email client is telling the PDF to be sant in a format they can read.  I suspect your using Microsoft Outlook to send the email.  Out of the box outlook wants to send email in the default Microsoft RTF exchange outlook format. If the person your sending to has Outlook, they don’t have an issue.  If the mail provider has software to convert this on the fly, they don’t have a problem either. But some mail providers, particularly local Internet service providers, don’t do this and send the email in whatever form it comes in.

Fortunately, the solution is extremely simple.  All you need to do is change your settings to send mail in a more common format that doesn’t require conversion.  Here are the steps:

  1. Open up your Outlook email client.
  2. Click on File located in the upper toolbar.
  3. Select the Options setting.
  4. From here, select the Mail category.
  5. Now, under Compose messages, you want to ensure the HTML or Plain Text option is selected for the Compose messages in this format.
  6. Next, underMessage format, set When sending messages in Rich text format to Internet recipients to Convert to HTML format or Plain Test format
  7. Click OK to finish.

If that doesn’t solve the problem,Microsoft has a technical note that might assist. Here’s a link to it.

How Many Email Addresses Do I Need?

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Screen Shot 2013-10-02 at 8.29.08 AMPeople often ask me a question about their email.  They question whether they need an additional email address over the one that their Internet service provider normally provides.  For many people, using the Internet email address put your service provider provides is fine.  Some people, for business or professional reasons, would like to have an additional address that they can use for those purposes. Other people feel that an additional email address, to use for sites that they register on, or for companies who insist upon having your email address, is a good idea to help reduce spam.  I would like to advocate you have more than one email address that you use.  I think that it’s important for you to protect the use of your primary email address from it becoming a spam mailbox. Using an additional email address for this purpose is a good way to prevent that from happening.

But how many email addresses do I need?

There was a time when retrieving email from multiple providers was a difficult thing.  It often requires you to log onto different websites and retrieve mail one site time.  In some cases, it even require you to run a specialized piece of software provided by that email vendor that allows you to get email from them.  But these things of changed. Today is easy to configure your email client to pick up multiple email addresses and merge them together into a single inbox for you to look at.  It’s also simple to segregate those email addresses based upon the way you use them.  For instance, if you have one particular email address that you use for signing up for coupons, you can have all of those coupons put in one location that you can then look at at your leisure.

My rule of thumb is that many people need three email addresses. First off, you need your primary email address that you use with friends and family. These are people that you want to be able to contact, and you want to make sure that that email address does not get compromised with spam.  Secondly, I’m a strong advocate of using a throwaway email address, that you can get free from many providers, for signing up for things that you dont care if you lose contact with.  If this address is sold by someone who you’ve provided it to, and ends up on the spam list, you can easily delete this email address and create a new free email address for this purpose.  Finally, many people that work, have an email address provided by their employer. Others who work for themselves, have a need to segregate their work email from the personal email. So many people will need a third email address for this purpose.

Applications such as Windows live mail, or mail on the Mac, allow you to easily set up these email addresses to all be retrieved the same time, show up in a single inbox if you like, and provide rules for what to do with emails that are on specific subjects.  Even higher in applications such as Microsoft outlook allow you to do the same thing.  In this way, having multiple email addresses becomes transparent to you as a user.

Where do I get another email address?

First off, if you’re setting a new email addresses you may want to consider using a high-quality free email service is your primary personal email address.  This way, if something causes you to change Internet service providers, you do not lose contact with those personal friends and family that are most important to you.  My first recommendation would be to use Gmail for this purpose. Microsoft also provides Outlook email at Outlook.com that’s a free email and also has very good performance.  Apple will provide you an iCloud email address for free also. One caveat with the Apple iCloud email address. If you’re using iCloud on the computer to synchronize contacts and calendars, you can only have one iCloud address active at any one time.

Other providers such as AOL, or Yahoo, also provide email addresses for free. Many people consider AOL, Yahoo and Hotmail spamming email addresses due to the fact that these email addresses of been around a long time and are often thought of as email services with high spam content.  I would also caution against using one of these three email addresses as your business email address.  There’s something about doing business with someone with a Hotmail account that makes people uneasy.

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Personal Email Address – your most prized email that you protect aginst spam.  Only give this out to friends and family.

“Throw away address” – one you can give to everyone.  If it becomes too much of a spam pot, you can delete it and start over with another free one.

Business Email Address – an address that you use strictly for business purposes.

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If you follow this idea, and have more than one email address, you’ll find that your primary email address it’s less difficult to deal with and you’re able to continue to use it for much longer period of time.