1. Analyze your old account

To manage your move smoothly, you need to understand

• Who has sent you email
• Who you have sent email to
• How often, and how recently

Remail.me collects this information from your old account and presents it in an easy to read format. This way, you can quickly decide how to handle each correspondent.

If you use Plaxo, it's easy to add your Plaxo contacts to your senders list too.

2. Tell some correspondents that you've moved

You probably don't want everyone to know about your new address. We make it really easy to select who you want to notify - and who you don't.

Incidentally, using an auto-responder to give people your new address is a really bad idea for two reasons. First, it's all-or-nothing, meaning you have to tell people you don't necessarily want to notify. But what's worse is that it also broadcasts your new email address to spammers.

3. Watch for messages from people you care about

Invariably, people you want to stay in touch with will keep sending email to your old account. That means you have to remember to keep checking it. And when you reply you're replying from your old account, which perpetuates the problem.

So remail.me watches your old account automatically and, when a message comes in from someone you've approved, we re-mail it to your new account. It will look and act just as if it had been sent there in the first place. For example, you can just hit "reply" to continue on with your email conversation.

If you've told us to, we also politely remind the sender about your new address.

4. Give people you've overlooked a way to get back in touch

No matter how careful you are, there are bound to be some people you overlook. So they keep sending mail to your old address, and wondering why you haven't replied.

We've created a neat way to fix this. When someone who you haven't approved emails your old account, our system sends them a message saying that you've moved, without telling them your new address. Instead, we direct them to a web page where they can say who they are and why they want to get in touch. We then forward that request to you for a decision. This way you protect your privacy without accidentally cutting off people you care about.

5. Build a clean, complete address book

If you're using web email, you're going to need a new address book. Most of the information you need is in your old email account, but lifting out just the part you want is incredibly tedious.

So remail.me helps you figure out who to include in your new address book, then puts it in a format that you can easily import into your new account.

6. Keep watching

The fact is, even after weeks or months of doing all of these things, new email will keep showing up in your old account. Much of it will be junk, but the odds are high that some of it will be from people you care about.

So remail.me includes our Account Monitor service for as long as your old account is still accessible - even after your subscription has expired.

When someone emails your account, we send them a message saying that you've moved — not telling them where, but instead offering them a way to let you know that they'd like to reconnect with you. Naturally, we let you know when this happens.

For free.

 

remail.me is a service of Tapit Partners LLC - Copyright © 2012; all rights reserved