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Thinking of changing your email provider? For users of Yahoo’s email service, the old adage of “fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me” is extremely relevant. Just a couple of weeks ago, Yahoo disclosed that a hacking attack in 2013 compromised more than one billion (with a B) accounts. This comes on the heels of a disclosure in September of a hacking incident in 2014, which exposed more than 500 million accounts. Of course, there are other reasons why one might want to change their email provider.
What then, should one think about when making such a change?
First, changing your email provider is going to be tedious. It is, however, significantly easier to change an email address than deal with the fallout of compromised data. Consequences of the Yahoo breach may include fraudulent credit card charges all the way up to outright identity theft. Already, there are warnings coming out from credit monitoring services that the data stolen from Yahoo are for sale on nefarious websites.
It will take time to completely make the switch. The first thing to do is send an email to all of your friends informing them of your new address. If you put all of the recipients in the “bcc” field, you will not expose any of their email addresses. This is the easy part.
The challenge will be dealing with the banks, stores, social media and other websites that you frequent. After all, every Internet-based service requires an email address, and many use that address as your login name. For many, this will be nearly impossible to remember all of the websites one uses. Take your best shot and do all the ones you can remember. Check your browser history for the past 30 to 60 days. For some services, this is an easy change, but for others it will be painful and may require a phone call.
If possible, leave the old email address intact and operable so you can catch any emails still going there and react accordingly. For Yahoo users this is not a problem. If you are migrating away from an Internet service provider, however, this could be problematic. Ideally, if you are considering changing ISPs and are using your ISP-provided email address, you should establish an alternative account 30 days or more before making the change.
What options are available for free email service? The two most popular options are Gmail from Google and outlook.com from Microsoft. If you are only going to access your email from a browser, then either service will be fine.
Gmail is the most widely used option. Its browser interface is more functional than outlook.com, but only a few folks will actually use those advanced features. Gmail can be more difficult to integrate with desktop- and smartphone- based email clients. This is a double-edged sword, however, as that difficulty is directly related to its security settings which, by default, are set higher than outlook.com. Gmail provides 15 gigabytes of storage.
Outlook.com is probably a better option if you live in a Microsoft world, where most businesses and government agencies still reside. It is more intuitive for those that have regularly used Microsoft products. By default, it is easier to integrate into the desktop Outlook client, but if you turn up the security settings, you will run into the same integration issues experienced with Gmail.
Finally, note that Verizon has agreed to acquire core assets of Yahoo, including its email service. When that deal was announced in July, it was expected to close in the first quarter of 2017. Since that time, the two breaches were announced, which have complicated the acquisition. Even if the deal does close as initially planned, any significant changes to the email service could take months. Waiting for improvements is not a good idea.
John Agsalud is an IT expert with more than 25 years of information technology experience. Reach him at johnagsalud@yahoo.com.
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