How to change your email address on Gmail. Hi, everyone.
Leo Notenboom here for askleo.com. This is actually
a relatively common question. How to change your email address
if you're using Google's Gmail? Well, the problem, of course,
is that you can't change it directly. I'll describe why and give
you a couple of alternatives. Why can't you just change your email Well,
the problem is very simple. Your email address
identifies your account. A different email address
implies a different account. You can't change your email address
without changing your account. That means that everything in your account is not transferred over when
you create another account. Everything in your account
is in your account. A different email address,
a different account. That's what it boils down to. And that's how you get
a different email address. If you want to change your email address, you end up needing to create
a new email account. Once you've done so, you have a new account
with a new email address, the email address that you
wanted to change to. But it's not quite what you wanted,
What people want is to be able to change the email address without changing
the account, without losing all their email,
without having anything else changed. They just want it to be
a different email address. It doesn't work like that. When you open a new account with a new email address, you now have two accounts,
your old account with your old email address and your new account
with your new email address. How do you manage this? Well, I two workarounds that might make it easy-ish to deal with having two accounts. Workaround number one,
a desktop email program. Like Thunderbird or
Microsoft Office's Outlook program or any of a number of other
desktop email programs. What you can do with those programs
is configure both accounts. Configure it to access your old account number one, configure it to access your
new account number two, you now have all of your email
from both accounts in the same place. You still have two accounts, you still have two email addresses,
but at least you're managing it all from a single place, the desktop
email program on your computer. Now, there's another approach that is perhaps a a little bit
more along the lines of what you're looking to do, but it requires a little
bit of configuration in Gmail itself. Let's go over here to Gmail and we'll
take a look at exactly what that means. Here we are in Gmail. I'm not going to switch to Chrome,
and I know that I've made some changes recently, so we'll just go ahead and
get rid of that message. The feature that I'm going to use
is It uses the ability of one Gmail account to check the email
of another Gmail account. Essentially, it basically centralizes
both accounts in a single Gmail interface. I do this constantly. In fact, it's how I manage
almost all of my email. Yes, I have a personal Gmail account,
I have a work Gmail account, but those Gmail addresses are
actually never specified anywhere. I don't use them publicly. What I use, of course,
are like leo@askleo.com Com.
I have my Gmail account configured to check email from that account
and bring it into Gmail. How do you do that? Let me show you. Here we are in my AskLeo test@gmail.
Com. account. What we need to do is click
on the gear icon in the upper right. Click on See All settings. This is buried in All settings. The item to click on is
Accounts and Import. Now, you can see here that there are several, several different features
associated with this section. The one that we care about is this. Check mail from other accounts. You would click on Add a Mail Account. You would specify the email address
that you're trying to check from. In my case, I would have
specified leo@askleo.com You might have specified
whatever your old address was at gmail.com. You can do either
of two different things. Honestly, I'm not sure what
the finer details of this are. I've now done both. They seem to work about the same. If you link accounts with Gmailify, well,
it basically makes both accounts show up here and treats them both like
Gmail accounts, even if they aren't. In our case, of course, they are. But if you're doing a different account, of course, then you could
apparently get some more features. I've typically done POP 3, which will
It also works for Gmail accounts. All it really does is fetches your email from that other account and then lets you
use your current Gmail account to basically read that email and in a
moment, send email from that account. Up to you. I honestly don't have
a strong choice either way. I'm more familiar with POP3,
but Gmailify looks like a reasonable way to approach it, especially if
you're using a Gmail account. I'm not going to go any further in this example because I just don't have
something to set up this way. The next would be to specify
the password for the account. Now, the issue, of course, is that if you have two-factor
authentication turned on, Gmail doesn't know how to deal
with two-factor authentication. What that means is that you have to create
what's called a app-specific password. That happens in the Gmail
account interface. You can simply go to settings for your account and search for app password,
and it will lead you to the setting and the steps required
to generate that unique password. Your regular password will not work if you
have two-factor authentication turned on. But once you have configured your new
account, the one we currently have open here,
to fetch emails from your old account, which is what we're configuring here
with add a mail account, then all of a sudden, all of your email
will show up in in the single inbox. Now, what if you want to be able to send
email from that old email address? Well, if you don't, you're done. If you're truly looking for a change and you no longer intend to send messages
using that old email address, you're done. You're now sending all of your email
from this new email address and still getting email that was sent to
either of the old or new email addresses. Fantastic. However, if you want to be able to send
us that old email address, one more step. We'll click on the gear icon again and go back to All settings, Accounts and Import,
and you'll see that there is a section here called Send Mail As,
and it includes by default the current, in this case, the new email
address that you've set up. Once again, you would click
on Add Another Email Address. You would specify the email address
that you want to send from, which in your case would be
whatever your old email@gmail. Com was, and then you would move on. The next step then, of course, will be to confirm that you've got access
to the old email address, that you actually are the proper
owner of that account. Otherwise, well, anybody could configure this to send from your email account,
and you don't want that to happen. The next step is, of course, to send a verification, get the number,
enter the number, all that stuff. The step after that, which I'm not going to go to, then
basically says, Okay, you're configured. Now, if you have used Gmailify,
or if you have used a Gmail account in both cases, you may not need
to configure any specific information. However, it is possible that using POP3 or in this send configuration,
you may need to configure the servers and the ports required
for or POP3 or SMTP access. Since you're dealing with just a Gmail account,
Google already knows what those settings are, and it will probably just import or
use the correct settings from the get go. If not, you can search for the pop three settings for Gmail, and it should
give you the information you need. After all is said and done, after you've
done all this, what are you left with? Well, you have two email accounts,
an an old one and a new one. You can sign in
to either of them at gmail. Com.
That's up to you. However, if you want to manage them
from one place, then using either a desktop program that's
configured to handle both, or if you configure your new account
to fetch email from your old account, you've got a single
place to deal with both. Now, there is one super important
caveat that I need to point out here. We've been talking about Gmail. We've been talking about email, specifically, your email address,
sending and receiving email. But your email address identifies your
Google account, and many people have much more associated
with that account than just email. You may have YouTube or Google Drive or
Google photos or any number of a bunch of different Google services all
associated with that old account. None of this changes any of that. All of your old photos, for example, if you were using Google photos,
are still in the old account. If you want to move them
to the new account, that's on you. That's true for any other Google service. Like I said, YouTube, your favorites, your playlists, Drive, the files that you
have stored on Google Drive, and so on. Do be aware that changing your Gmail address not only
creates you a second account for email, but it also creates you a second account
for all of the Google services that you may be using associated
with your old email address. Hope that helps a little bit. Hope that clarifies exactly what it
means to get a new Gmail address. For updates, for comments, for links related to the topic
and more, visit askleo.com/167066.
I'm Leo Notenboom, and this is askleo.com.
Thanks for watching.
