What happens to your old email addy when you swap internet providers?

[yellowvan]

Am considering swapping from rubbish tiscali to all singing/dancing virgin media. All my passwords, logins and general life use my tiscali email. i've got a gmail acc, but anything important goes to tiscali. Will they stop delivering to it if i cancel? have I got to trawl through every shopping site and password I've ever used and change them all? Apols for general thickness, and thanks for help.

I think the short answer is yes, it just dies. I would just change/update them as you need them, will only be missing out on loads of spam. IIRC it's easy to import your contacts to gmail though.

Some ISPs will allow you to keep an e-mail address (downgrade to dial-up) but yes, it is usually a big problem if you use your ISP mail address for things - far too many people use the same mail address and password for different web sites (which means that if any one of those sites has a crooked employee or gets hacked, access to many other sites can be gained - once your e-mail account is open, then any e-mail you have points to which other sites you use).

For some time I've used spamgourmet.com for web site contact. It hides your main e-mail address, and then if you change mail address, you just set the new mail address in spamgourmet.com

I always recommend a period of 6-8 weeks for changing mail addresses, so the less frequent messages you might get on the one you are abandoning are seen and allow you time to change your details with the website. I'd never replace with the new ISP mail account, but use GMail or similar (free or paid-for commercial) mail service, or a spamgourmet.com address.

One (minor) problem with spamgourmet addresses is that they are of the format
. . @ spamgourmet.com

For most sites that's OK, but a few get 'confused' about having a name with dots in, even though some firms have mail addresses with dots in, like [email protected] or [email protected]

Thanks. I guess its mainly only really Amazon and Tesco, and mumsnet. Thanks for advice.

good job it isn't 200 web sites !!

mum changed from tesco to bt, and had this with her tesco address. she couldn't access it to see her emails, but i found a way (options?) to forward the mail on to her new provider. FWIW, I set her up on hotmail in the meantime, so she didn't have this again.

I've set myself up with a domain name to get round this, my ISP account forwards in and out of the domain name address, you can then change the ISP and adjust the settings for the domain name. Haven't got round to changing the ISP yet though.