Moving Day

Moving your residence from one house to another is one of life’s more difficult and unpleasant tasks, despite the joys associated with the new location to which you are moving. Only slightly less unpleasant is having to move your email address from one place to another. Yesterday, I began that process as I decided to retire p_nelson (at) vic.com, an email address I have had for the last eleven years.

First, I sent out an email to the people in my address book who had that address as the primary contact point for me, asking that they make the change in their address book. One thing that made that chore easier was using the mass mailing feature of my email program, The Bat!. I drafted a message, selected the mass mailing template I had created and then chose the recipients from my address book, and the program generated a personalized email to each individual. Many of the people who received my request wrote back to acknowledge they had made the requested change. That was the easy part.

The more challenging part of this transition comes in trying to correct the contact point at the software vendors, web sites, digital identity systems, and online communities where I have given that address as my primary contact address. After eleven years, it is difficult, if not impossible, to retrace your steps and make sure everything is covered. If one were smart, he would use some forethought and maintain a database that he updated continuously of all the locations where he used such an address, but this “one” wasn’t that foreward thinking through the years. I have found a program though that helps to track such things, if any of you are smart enough to learn from someone else’s mistakes. It’s called Roboform, there’s a free version of it, and you might find it worth a look.

So my task in the coming 6 weeks before that old email address expires will be to try to recall and contact all the places where I am known by that email address and have them update their records. If I do a few each day, I expect I’ll eventually get most of them, but I am reasonably certain that I’ll overlook some of them no matter how hard and diligently I try.