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Google is 'gradually rolling out' option to change your gmail.com address
- arthurcolle 10mo agoTerrible idea. Will lead to nothing but chaos
- nytesky 10mo agoThis is so useful. a Gmail account is so much more than just an email account at this point. my first gmail account was made when anonymity and cool email was more of trend than your actual name - so i based upon my favorite book in 2006. 20 years later the account is tied to my oft used primary google voice number so lingers even with obscure and hard to spell email. i could gave moved my google voice number, but it seems like a convoluted process and have had my number since about Grand Central acquisition.
- jonway 10mo agoin my experience, in/out porting with google is super quick and works great. It costs $20.00 IIRC. I port my primary phone number around to avoid unlawful surveillance, handy tool in the bag.
- kelseyfrog 10mo agoThat would have been nice to have during transition. Creating a new account and updating 3rd parties was a huge pain and never got close to 100% completion.
- nmstoker 10mo agoCould this be a sign that Google is starting to think again? For an organisation that often does deeply intelligent things, they spend such a lot of time treating their users unnecessarily poorly because obvious implications seem not to occur to them.
- pretext-1 10mo agoI think they know about them they just don’t care enough to spend money on fixing them. They are still primarily an ad company today and their users are still primarily the product not customers.
- HocusLocus 10mo agoBoss move that I learned under great difficulty: a new temporary gmail alias for every jobsearch.
- Imustaskforhelp 10mo agoHm interesting, do you want to tell why this helps out a lot perhaps?
- HocusLocus 10mo ago;) I was a by-invitation-beta in 2004, trust me. Even then spammers knew about the +1234 trick too. The earliest throwaway forwarders suffered from explosive growth and spam netblocks and their queue times varied greatly. The golden age of Viagra and recruiters selling prospect lists to randos. I retreated to gmail for the SPOP and because my original address was Tech Contact for 100+ domains from 1994-2000. Thousands a week. If I was smart I'd have used it as a honeypot to feed a spam blocking service.
- makeitdouble 10mo agoDon't you get these spam mails either way ? I have a separate email I only use to get government and public services (gas, electricity) stuff and it still receives a few hundreds of spam a week. At this point I kinda feel whitelisting the mail I want to read is the only sane option, so getting hundreds or thousands of spam mail makes little difference, while managing a portofolio of addresses is a chore.
- pram 10mo agoiCloud Hide My Email is pretty good for this.
- njuhhktlrl 10mo agomyjobapplicationhasbeendenied-1582-timesalready@gmail.com will certainly end well.
- sans_souse 10mo ago
- firefax 10mo agoI wish they'd let me recover my original -- I lost my TOTP generator, and the codes I'd written down in a paper notebook were rejected. I even hunted down the electronic copy in case there was a transcription error -- seemed like some failure in their systems was causing me to lose access despite having followed proper procedures. Lost a decade and a half of correspondence dating back to my teenage years. I had imported my phone number I'd had since I was 16 into voice, and it doubled as my Signal number. I even had a Gsuite subscription so I could use their (admittedly decently) UI to power my firstname @ lastname dot com email address. I will never use their services again, I was really digusted by this failure.
- ryukoposting 10mo agoYikes. This post is an unsettling reminder that gmail is a single point of failure in my personal and financial security.
- cedws 10mo agoEmail services in general. My worst nightmare is my email provider (which isn't Google) going dark and losing access to everything.
- firefax 10mo agoIf you use a password manager like Keepass, you should still be able to log into your other accounts if you lost access and at least with financial institutions you can call, ask that no changes be made with without coming into the branch and showing ID.
- cedws 10mo agoYes, but many companies will also drag their feet, refuse for "security reasons", or you'll just never be able to reach them in the first place because their only support is an AI concierge that tells you the same thing over and over. As an example Anthropic and OpenAI don't let you change your email address.
- aszen 10mo agoSeems useful. But what I really want is a way to merge google accounts, over the course of history I created 3 of them and would really prefer just a single one
- nacozarina 10mo agoan here I am still grinding on a mid-90s iname.com handle
- pfooti 10mo agoHah, I had one of those. I paid $50 for a "lifetime email service" that later they wanted me to pay monthly for, so I had to bid goodbye to my null.net address
- EGreg 10mo agoI never really had this issue because I used Google Suite with a domain. (That’s what it was called back then.) So I can have email aliases under that domain, and even choose the alias for outgoing email. However! This creates an extra security hole. Once I was SIM-swapped (when the attacker calls up a phone company and convinces them to redirect sms to their SIM). I had used it as a second factor at GoDaddy and had to act fast. GoDaddy had already allowed the attacker to authenticate with the sms (dumb!) and port the domain name. I realized what was happening only because the attacker sent “test” emails to my email at the domain. Had they not done that, I might have been none the wiser. I called GoDaddy and got them to cancel it, thankfully. Otherwise they’d have reset passwords armed with email AND phone number. Since then I use the non-SMS SECOND FACTOR on most services, as NIST had been recommending for a decade now. I personally recommend using a username+alias@gmail.com which gmail and others support, with a different but easy-to-remember alias per site, so social attackers can’t even correctly say your email to the dude on the phone. Michael Terpin, a guy I know, got $27 million dollars in crypto stolen a decade ago by a SIM Swapper and sued AT&T for it. Not sure if he won… he moved to Puerto Rico to avoid taxes and brought Brock Pierce and other crypto bros with him LOL.
- ocdtrekkie 10mo agoIt's incredible that in 2025, Google has sprung for "basic competency" after operating a bad email service for 24 years. In my case, many years ago I changed my last name. (Turns out a lot of women also do this when they do things like... get married. But also for a progressive company everyone's purchases being permanently locked to their deadname seems... bad.) But all of my Android apps, my entire digital life at the time, was permanently locked to my old name. I had another account I created as a mail forwarder but if people sent an invite to it for a Google thing it wouldn't connect to my real account, and obviously there was an added security risk of someone stealing my forwarding account. I remember talking to Yonatan Zunger about this problem during the Google+ era and it seemed to be renaming an account wasn't something the company was capable of.
- therobots927 10mo agoFun fact, if someone knows your email address and clicks “forgot my password” it sends a push notification to the Gmail and YouTube apps asking to confirm or deny the sign in request. They can click that hundreds or thousands of times per day. I know because it happened to me, so I moved all of my accounts off of the email and deleted my YouTube account. :) peace out Google. Thanks for tolerating a completely insane UI, and not allowing me to turn this setting off. I can’t imagine what it’s like for the elderly who have to navigate this completely enshitified landscape.
- xchip 10mo agogmail sucks, I'm getting 2-3 spam emails a day, am I the only one?
- lysace 10mo agoMaybe 10 annually.
- jwrallie 10mo agoIf you only get 2-3 you are lucky :)
- bobsmooth 10mo agoI wouldn't know, I don't look at my spam folder.
- marticode 10mo agoI have almost zero spam (that isn't filtered properly). Once in a while I catch a false positive in the spam folder but that's about it.
- TechRemarker 10mo agoWow this is massive, but will come down to whether you switch to another existing address you have. That is you have example1@gmail.com and example2@gmail.com. The first one has all your decades of data and second is name you've reserved etc. With handles you can release one and use on another account so hopefully option to do the same. Or if they could just update their account migration to support migrating all historic data that would accomplish the same.
- 9dev 10mo agoOh, finally. I’m one of the first.last@gmail folks, which I assumed would never change when I was 13 years old (hah!). Fast forward a few years, I got married, and am stuck with my old name in the address.
- Dries007 10mo agoA bit off topic, but changing your name when getting married is so strange to me. It is not at all common where I live (Belgium), in fact I don't think I personally know a single person who did.
- revax 10mo agoWhile optional, it's very common in France.
- voidfunc 10mo agoIts from the days when women were property of their man.
- B-Con 10mo agoIt hails from when family lines were important, and you can practically only have one line reflected in a name. Unsurprisingly, most societies considered the male's name to be the dominate lineage of interest, although that doesn't hold true 100% of the time.
- fc417fc802 10mo ago> you can practically only have one line reflected in a name Not true at all. You can trivially have two family names in a full legal name. In fact many cultures do exactly that to this day. Also worth noting that the male's name being preferentially propagated makes a lot of sense in a society where the best off frequently inherited their vocation from their fathers.
- 10mo ago
- jaynate 10mo agoMy gmail address is first.last@gmail.com. From time to time (and for years) I get someone else’s at firstlast@gmail.com. I thought that a Gmail account that was first.last@gmail also allowed for email sent to firstlast@gmail (no period) to reach my inbox as well. I’ve received some sensitive/PII content over the years. I’ve wondered if this person has access to any of my information? Not necessarily related to this post, but wonder why and how this could happen.
- lysace 10mo ago> I’ve wondered if this person has access to any of my information? No. They have just told someone your email address and that someone has sent you stuff. Anyone can do that, if they dream up your email address. People having the same name are a lot more likely to do that. Happened to me as well. I was the first one of the 50 people or so carrying my name to register "first[.]last@gmail.com" back in 2004. At least two of my namesakes have since mistakenly used my email address. Some people just aren't very detail-oriented.
- dmurray 10mo agoMaybe their email is lastfirst@gmail.com, and people occasionally misremember your address and send your correspondence to them. In that case, yes. More likely their email address is firstlastnumber@gmail.com or firstlast@otherprovider.com though, in which cases the types of mistakes people make are likely asymmetric.
- jibal 10mo agoperiods are ignored in gmail addresses so there's no difference between firstlast@gmail.com and first.last@gmail.com
- neilv 10mo agoI bet this is it. I have a first.lastname@gmail.com, and my namesake has firstmlastname@gmail.com (with middle initial, and I think they originally created the GMail username without periods). So, I sometimes receive emails intended for him, by people who saw firstmlastname and think it's firstlastname. Maybe around a hundred emails so far, over the years. I've gotten good at telling at a glance that an email is for him, without reading it, and forwarding and deleting. Fortunately, my namesake is a very accomplished good-guy, so I'm happy to help.
- brikym 10mo agoI really want unlimited aliases for signing up to sites and tracking who is leaking my data.
- DetectDefect 10mo agomailbox.org hooked up to Thunderbird allows you to do so using custom domains. You can send and receive email as any string @ your domain.
- squigz 10mo agoYou can do something like email+site@gmail.com and it'll be delivered to email@gmail.com with the site in the To field
- brikym 10mo agoAnd the spammers will omit the + alias
- phyzome 10mo agoI sign up with a different email address on every website. (I have a catchall at my domain, rather than using plus-addressing.) The results are more boring than you think. Almost no one leaks my address. A couple have been hacked, but almost all of those are widely known. (I did discover one early and help Troy Hunt validate a leak.) At least one Kickstarter campaign has shared my address, as has a local business. But that seems to be the extent of it. I still do it, because I did manage to catch those things, and because it reduces cross-site correlation. But yeah, there's less skeevy behavior than you might think.
- Panoramix 10mo agoI find that just about everybody is leaking my data. Either on purpose or accidentally. But at the end of the day I do want to order those online exotic vegetables and have very little choice of sites to do it in my country. At this point I don't care anymore. Maybe I should but in a sense it's too late. It's been decades of leaked information, I'm certain the advertising companies know me better than my friends. And still royally fail at selling me stuff. They likely use this info for more nefarious things. I hate that 90% of the effort on the internet is about stealing information from users and serving invasive ads.
- newswangerd 10mo agoAs someone who has been stuck with an email address I created when I was 13, this would certainly be a welcome change!
- mshroyer 10mo agoYeah, I imagine this will help a lot of people who created retrospectively-cringey email addresses in their youth, but kept them over the years because of inertia > After changing, Google details that your original email address will still receive emails at the same inbox as your new one and work for sign-in, and that none of your account access will change.
- RulerOf 10mo ago> people who created retrospectively-cringey email addresses in their youth, but kept them over the years because of inertia I feel seen in threads like this one.
- frantathefranta 10mo agoI’m in the same boat, this just feels like someone born 1996-2000 finally has some decision-making power at Google.
- pclark 10mo agoI’m tempted to change from peter.clark@ to something more obscure; i get SO MANY emails directed at other Peter Clark’s, it’s bizarre and makes my inbox unusable.
- tclancy 10mo agoHuh. I have come to find the information about other tclancys across the world an interesting insight. Plus there was the time I was mistakenly sent a resume to review for a guy applying to become bank president; he didn't get the gig, but it wasn't because of the three or four paragraphs I sent him on spiffing up the thing.
- pclark 10mo agoI once got an email — addressed to some other pclark@ — which was simply a photo of a duck and the message “what duck is this?” I was so disappointed that he never thanked me for replying accurately and expeditiously.
- tclancy 10mo agoI assume it was for Petula Clark. Not because it makes sense, because it makes the absurdity a little more pungent. What kind of duck was it? My … favorite tclancy is the one in Australia because I can sense the change in seasons when he gets to rutting and signs up for a rather specific sort of adult dating site each year.
- fragmede 10mo agoWhat's stopping you?
- mlmonkey 10mo agoI don't understand why they don't allow different domains. "gmail.com" is running low on email addresses; if they added more domains, they'd be able to really scale up their email offering.
- crazygringo 10mo agoBranding and marketing. It makes it crystal clear how popular it is. And gmail.com isn't "running low" on addresses, I don't even know what that means. Whatever TLD you'd prefer, just append it to your username instead. Exact same amount of uniqueness.
- guessmyname 10mo agoOne of my email addresses is {MyNameKP}@gmail.com. “KP” were just random letters I picked years ago and they don’t mean anything. I also own {MyName}@hotmail.com. Someone once asked why I don’t use {MyName}@gmail.com, so I went home to try to sign up for it, but Gmail said the address already exists. I figured someone else had it and might sell, so I emailed them. Gmail auto-replied that the address doesn’t exist. Why can’t I register an address that isn’t there? Who knows ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
- cromka 10mo agoAren't email addresses reserved once you delete an account? Maybe that's what happened?
- AbstractH24 10mo agoThere’s a class action suit about g suite free accounts that eventually become not free. Wonder if this will be used for that at some point
- cromka 10mo agoIt definitely sounds like it would make an easy way out for them.
- jonathanlydall 10mo agoI wonder if they’ll make it work like Outlook.com’s support for multiple email addresses on the same account which they made a fully first class feature. Although I primarily use a Gmail for my personal email, I still have a Hotmail address from the 90s. For at least 10 years now Outlook.com and Microsoft accounts have supported multiple aliases. This has allowed me to keep my old cringey box name at Hotmail address, but also have a name.surname@outlook.com on the same account, which looks nicer for Microsoft services I use, like Windows login with OneDrive.
- cromka 10mo agoOh man, I hope they'll eventually also allow to use this to depart your account from Workspace into GMail. This would prove especially useful to GSuite Legacy people.
- caminanteblanco 10mo agoI am sure I am not the only person to have a somewhat juvenile email that has become the center of their digital lives. I would be very happy to change my email.
- albert_e 10mo agoYahoo Mail had (has?) a feature that allowed you to set an alternative email address while keeping your original email address intact. you could be first_last@yahoo.com but also have rando_waldo@yahoo.com or ymail.com receive emails in same mailbox. And you could choose the "From" address form a drop-down when sending outbound emails or replies.
- paxys 10mo agoAliases have always been a thing though. You could already create a new account and send/receive emails from that address in your original account.
- tomyhsieh 10mo agoIt’s definitely a welcome move, but when I try it (obviously by registering a new account since it’s not rolling out yet), most decent usernames I can come up with are already taken. A next good move would be releasing old, unused email addresses for others to claim (or even bid for, as X and Proton did). Although this would probably mean opening up another huge rabbit hole, which Google likely won’t be bothered to deal with anyway, so……Meh.
- MiachelC 10mo agoWho uses Gmail anyway, just use proton. I am only using gmail when i need to.
- Gerald_Malloy 10mo ago[dead]