How to change your email address without losing messages

It's easy to change your email address when you do it in the right order. You set up the new address first and keep the old one running, with its emails forwarded, while you move your emails, calendar and contacts. Once people know about the change and your accounts are updated, you close the old address last.

Whether you can rename the address you already have depends on your provider. Microsoft, for example, lets you add a new email address to your existing account as an alias. The alias works as a second username for the same account. You keep your contacts, online storage, subscriptions and settings. Look for a similar option in your own provider's account settings or help pages before you start. Where your provider has no such option, changing your email address means creating a new one and moving to it in the six steps below.

Why change your email address?

It's worth changing your email address when you want to:

• move from a free address to a professional business email address with your business name in it, such as hello@yourbusiness.co.uk, so people see straight away who is writing
• match the new name of your business
• leave behind an inbox full of spam. If you're moving for this reason, start fighting spam on the new address straight away.
• start again after your email password has leaked or someone has hacked the account. Make sure you secure the old account first.

How to change your email address in 6 steps

Your old address keeps working until the very end, so you don't miss a message while the new one takes over.

1. Create your new email address

Create the new address before you change anything else. For an address with your business name in it, you need a domain and an email plan. If you don't have a domain yet, register your own domain first. Then choose an email plan and create the address in our control panel. How many addresses you can create depends on the plan, so pick one that covers everyone who needs an address.

2. Forward emails from your old address

Set up forwarding at your old email provider, so new emails sent to the old address reach your new one too. In Gmail, for example, you add your new address as a forwarding address, then click the verification link Gmail sends to your new inbox. Back in Gmail's settings, you switch forwarding on and choose what happens to the copy in the old inbox, such as keeping it there. Then you save your changes. If your old address is with us, you can set up forwarding in the control panel. We then send a confirmation email to the new inbox, and you verify the forwarding from there.

Keep the old address and its forwarding running as long as people still write to it.

3. Move your emails, calendar and contacts

Old emails stay where they are until you transfer them. In our webmail, you can import your emails from another account, such as Gmail, Hotmail or Yahoo. The import copies your emails and folders into a folder named after the old account, and nothing changes on the old account. It can take up to 2 days to finish.

Your email calendar moves as a file. Look for the export option in your old calendar or email app, which may be in its settings or tools menu. Export your calendar from your old account as an ICS file, the format recommended for calendar events. In Google Calendar, for example, you export on a computer under Import and export in the settings, then open the .zip file that downloads to get your ICS files. Import each ICS file into the calendar in your webmail.

Contacts move the same way. Export your online address book from the old account as a CSV file, a plain list with one contact per line. Then import the file into the address book of your new account if it accepts CSV files, or add your contacts there one by one.

4. How to notify contacts of a change of email address

Send one message from your new address to notify everyone at once. Put all your contacts in its Bcc field, so nobody sees anyone else's address. A few lines under the subject "My new email address" are enough, such as:

"Hello, I've changed my email address. From now on, please write to me at [new email address] and save it in your contacts. My old address, [old email address], stays open for a while, but please don't use it any more."

5. Set an auto-reply on your old address

Some people will keep writing to your old address for a while. Set an auto-reply there with a short version of your change of email address notification, so they know where to write instead. If your old address is with us, you can set up an auto-reply in webmail. To prevent spam, it sends one automatic reply per day to each address.

6. Update your email address everywhere else

Change your address on your website, your social media profiles, your email signature, your business cards and other printed materials.

Next, update the online accounts that use your old address, starting with your bank, your suppliers and the shops you buy from. Your old inbox shows which services still write to you there. An account that sends login codes or password resets to an address you've closed is hard to get back into.

Send and receive email from an address on your own domain, with webmail, a calendar and a spam filter in every mailbox.

When can you close your old email address?

You can close your old email address once nothing arrives there any more and three things are done. Your email import has finished, and your calendar and contacts files are saved. No account still uses the old address to log in or reset a password. Until then, the forwarding and the auto-reply catch what's still on its way.

Once the old address is closed, your new one is the address people know you by. On your own domain, it stays the same even if you later change email provider, so you won't have to make this move again. Get an email address on your own domain with one of our email plans.