Strategies for getting correspondents to use your new email address

Last revision August 15, 2007

Do you need more than one new email address?

Since you have to contact people with a new email address anyway, think about your long-term email needs. Although most people will find it easiest to switch from their pangea email address to their @stanford.edu address, when you leave Stanford that address will stop working, with no forwarding (students get a 120 day grace period; faculty and staff only 3 days). Then you have this problem all over again.

One strategy is to setup a personal email account with an outside service provider such as yahoo or google that will be "permanent". Give that address to your personal correspondents and use it for web accounts such as newspapers and banks. Give out your @stanford.edu address for professional contacts or activities related to Stanford. Most email programs can be configured to check multiple accounts automatically. Or, if you really want all your email to end up in one place, have one account forward to the other. At least this way, when you leave Stanford, your personal correspondents don't have to change to a new address (you may have to change or disable forwarding, but that is easy).

Students can create a permanent personal email account with the Stanford Alumni Association as soon as they begin their studies - no need to wait until you graduate! Although the disk quota on that account is small, you can configure it to forward to any other account of your choice. This allows students to keep an address that is connected to Stanford, even after they leave.

Tell everyone in your address book about your new email address.

The goal is to get correspondents to stop using your old pangea email address and send directly to your new email address. The "low-hanging fruit" is the list of people in your email address book. Start by sending a simple "change of address" message to everyone in that address book.

Update directories and published lists of email addresses.

Make it easy for people to find your new email address by updating your entries in the School of Earth Sciences personnel directory (click on the login link in the upper right to edit your entry) and the Stanford Directory.

If you are active at Stanford, people will expect to reach you with an @stanford.edu email address. Whether you are now using that as your main email account, or are forwarding it to an outside account, make an email alias in the Stanford Directory of the form Firstname.Lastname@stanford.edu. This is often easier for others to remember than your actual SUNet ID.

Where else is your old pangea address "published"? Many print materials can not be changed, unfortunately, but if your department or other organization periodically prints rosters, tell them to use your new email address in the next edition.

Don't forget to order new business cards with your new email address!

Update web pages that show your email address.

Your email address may appear on personal or professional web pages, such as social networking sites or your research group web site. To see where your pangea email address is published on the web, try running a google search - just use the short form username@pangea for maximum search generality, where username is your pangea account name (or alias that you use).

You may be surprised at how many web pages publish your email address. Update those pages with your new email address (or send a note to the web page maintainer) if you want to keep receiving email from the likely audiences for those pages, but use obfuscation techniques to keep your email address from being harvested by spammers.

Check the "return" address configured in your email programs and outside accounts.

Email programs that you run on a Windows or Macintosh PC, such as Eudora, Outlook, Mac OS Mail, or Thunderbird, store your return address in their configuration and add it as a header line to every email. Some also let you set a different Reply To address that will also be added as a header line in each email. Even some web-based email accounts from outside providers, such as yahoo and google, let you configure this "return" or "reply-to" address that gets put in each email header. These header values get used automatically when your email recipients select the "reply" function in their email program.

Look through the configuration settings of each email program (or web-based account) you use to find and fix your return or reply-to address to show your new account, not pangea. Don't forget to check the settings on every computer you use. Then send an email message to yourself at your new address using each of these programs or accounts. Turn on full headers when you look at that message and look carefully for any reference to your pangea account - and fix it!

Many email programs, including many of the web-based outside service providers such as google, also let you define a "signature" which is automatically appended to the text of every message. Many people use this to give their title, preferred email address, telephone number, etc. This is in addition to the "return" or "reply-to" address which your program puts into the email header. Be sure to look for this "signature" and fix it to show your new address; perhaps add a line that explicitly asks people to stop sending email to you at pangea. Again, test by sending an email to yourself from that program or account and see what shows in the message text.

Change your email address on your mailing list subscriptions.

Think about all the email "mailing lists" to which you have subscribed. If you used your pangea email account for those, you need to change that. If you haven't kept a list of them, now is a good time to start!

Eventually, almost everyone at Stanford ends up on some of the Stanford mailing lists managed by the Mailman service. They have names of the form listname@lists.stanford.edu. Sometimes your email address is added by someone else. For example, your department administrator may add you to a Stanford mailing list of all students or faculty in your department. Follow these instructions to find out which Stanford mailing list subscriptions use your pangea email address and change those to your new address.

Update your web site account registrations that require an email address.

Many web sites require that you register with an email address in order to access the site content. Some even use that email address as your site login name. If you registered on any site with your pangea email address, you need to change that to your new address. These kinds of web site registrations are a good use for a second "permanent" email address from an outside provider, rather than using your @stanford.edu acccount. Then you won't have to change them all again when you leave Stanford.

In many cases, your browser "remembers" your login information for these sites so that you forget that you ever registered. This is a good time to start keeping a list of these registrations if you aren't doing so already! Pay attention (for a change) to the news and marketing emails that you may get from these sites to help you create your list.

Some examples of web sites that require registration with an email address are:

• Online newspaper sites such as the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, or Washington Post.
• Online banking sites, credit card sites, and online stock brokerage accounts.
• The web site of your health insurance company, HMO, or doctor's group.
• Shopping sites, such as Amazon and Netflix.
• Airline frequent flier program websites and online travel agencies such as Expedia and Travelocity.
• Professional associations and forums.
• Online forums and social networking sites, such as MySpace.
• Product registration and support sites, such as Apple and HP.

Do you have other email accounts that were forwarding to pangea?

If your @stanford.edu email account was previously forwarding to your pangea email account, you should have fixed that already when you checked your settings in the Stanford Directory.

But did you ever setup an email account on an outside service such as yahoo or google, or a private domain name, and then configure it to forward to your pangea address so all your email would come to one place? What about the email address at your former school or employer - did you ask them to forward to your pangea address? You need to change those configurations or contact those former affiliations and get them to forward to your new email address (or stop forwarding altogether).

Check your email at your new address regularly for messages sent to pangea.

So far, every idea on this page has been to proactively seek out places where your old pangea email address is being used and update it to your new address. If you follow all these steps, that should go a long way towards eliminating the use of your old pangea address.

The last step is to monitor your new email messages to look for those still being sent to your old pangea email address and then forwarded to your new email address. At first, when there are likely to be many of these, you might rely on your own visual scanning. Don't forget to immediately fire off a reply to any email whose To: field shows your old pangea address; ask that correspondent to update his address book or mailing list with your new email address.

Eventually, emails forwarded from your old pangea address will become scarce as people change to your new address. At that point, consider setting up a filter in your email program to move new emails with your old pangea address in the To: field to a separate mail folder. Check that folder once a day and ask those correspondents to update to your new address.

Ready to stop forwarding email from pangea?

Finally, when all your correspondents have been notified, and you are no longer getting any email that you want forwarded from your pangea address, use the Email Management module of the pangea account maintenance web server to disable forwarding altogether. Although pangea does not forward any messages that it identifies as "spam" (junk mail), there is always some spam that gets through the filters. Disabling forwarding will prevent that spam from reaching your new address. Just be aware that once you disable email forwarding from your pangea address, you cannot go back and re-enable it! In any case, all email forwarding from pangea addresses will end on June 30, 2008.

Update your own email address book to stop using other pangea addresses

Although this web page is all about telling your correspondents to stop sending mail to you at your old pangea address, and use your new address instead, don't forget that you need to stop sending email to other people in the School of Earth Sciences at their pangea addresses. Update the address books in your email programs and web based accounts with their new addresses. You probably want to wait until November to do that, by which time everyone will have switched to a new address, but pangea will still be forwarding from their old address. A special email forwarding information web page will show the new addresses for pangea accounts to help you update your own address books.

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