Name change guide

A guide to changing your name because it's an administrative hassle and I wish I had some shortcuts

View the Project on GitHub DuffleOne/name-change

Email address

Needs

Introduction

Since so much of everything else depends on email for communication, I would be mindful about doing this while other things are going on. Keep this one for a weekend. I started here as it’s a quick win, and it makes you feel great when you use the email address. You can keep using the old address, which means you can do this even if you’re not out yet.

I’m a little technical and have a non-standard email setup. If you have a standard @googlemail.com or @hotmail.co.uk style setup, then you may find this slightly harder.

If you’re not changing your email address, you can update your name on associated accounts then you’re pretty much sorted.

Forwarding

If you don’t mind logging into services with your existing email but want to receive and send mail from a new address, then you can create a new account and use it as an alias.

If you want to login to services with a new address but want to receive and send mail from your old address, then you can do the same and use the old address as an alias.

In my opinion, Gmail is the easiest to get this working. But Office 365 (Microsoft) and Yahoo all can get this working. The first thing to do: If you have an Apple or Microsoft account, you’ll want to be mindful of changing your email by creating a new account. Your game and app purchased are associated with the account! Reach out to their support teams first to see what is available!

If your provider literally just provides email:

  1. Create a new account
  2. Do some basic setup like your name etc
  3. Go into the settings of your account and add an email alias. It may ask you to confirm this on your old account. This will let you send email as your old account.
  4. Go into the settings of your old account, set a forwarding address so all email is forwarded automatically to your new account.
  5. Make an effort to change all services you can to your new address so you can eventually stop worrying about your old account.

Sync your inbox

If your email account provider supports IMAP, I would always use https://imapsync.lamiral.info/. This software has helped with every email migration I’ve ever done. It is a command line tool so non-technical people may want to give up here and accept that they can keep access to their old address for reading archived emails.

Remember, you can still keep your old address to review old emails while receiving all new email into a new account.

The creator of the software offers limited support if you have time and patience, and I can try my best to help too, but there are so many thousands of methods of doing this and it can get crazy.

Custom domain

If you have a custom domain and you didn’t set it up yourself. You’ll want to ask who set it up to handle it as each setup is unique. If you set it up yourself, you should have it handled 😉