It’s looking likely I’ll be making the move full time to France mid year, one of the things to do is change all banking, savings, pensions, forums (inc SurviveFrance) to another email address, maybe Gmail or other if you can recommend a better one.
To keep our bt email addresses it’s roughly £10 a month but officially you are only allowed it if you have a UK address, I’m sure some do keep it though when moving overseas.
So my question is, just how difficult is it to change email addresses for banking, savings, pensions, premium bonds, forums etc, off the top of my head I’ve probably got at least 10 for savings alone and then maybe half that for the wife. So quite a exercise I would imagine.
I’m really pleased you are braving the move! It’s a heck of a faff but, having done it, we’d never go back
Personally, I hate Gmail but most people seem to use it so of course you could do that. One thought is - do you have broadband/fibre at your house? They usually come with an email address but then I suppose you’d be stuck with that provider…
What we did (because of our previous occupations) was to get our own domain name from a French provider but perhaps that wouldn’t work out for you and almost certainly costs more.
I’m sure other people have tackled this and will have better ideas than me!
We had no choice but change our email addresses with everyone when aliceadls ceased to exist, because our alice addresses were no longer accessible. It was an exercise that had to be done methodically with a lot of cross checking to make sure that as little as possible slipped through the net, though inevitably a few things did, and it required a lot of patience because whilst some changes were easy, others seemed to think that it was a suspicious thing to want to do and required identity checks and much sending of codes, including by snail mail in some cases. But this was many many years ago and my impression is that it has become a lot easier to update email addresses and phone numbers, change passwords etc than it used to be. Organizations seem to have realized that it is something people need to do for various legitimate reasons.
This is a great tactic to hang on to customers as it’s such a faff to change email addresses. I’d recommend to everyone to pick up their own domain name and avoid the risk of being held to ransom by any mail provider, including Google etc.
We have a domain name for our gîte, but it costs €7/month with website hosting.
How does one just set up domain +email?
It could be worth doing.
But @Grumpy_OldMan whatever you do, do it while you still have a UK address and preferably while still in UK. It’s even more of a pain afterwards, and in fact we’ve not completely done it yet. But then on,y 20 years here so what’s the rush
It is usually possible to register a domain name (which then makes email addresses possible) and then have all emails forwarded to a generic email provider like GMail or Apple.
For example, Krystal Hosting (who I use to host my websites) offer this if you buy a domain name through them - they charge £7.99 a year plus VAT for a .co.uk domain and £11.99 a year plus VAT for a dot com.
You have to ask them to set up email forwarding but that’s a free service.
If you want a website as well that’s priced from £7 a month.
Either way, get a generic email address - I use Apple so I have a dot-mac address (nowadays I think they give you a dot-me email by default).
You can either just use this for all communications “as is”, or if you prefer to have a snazzier personalised domain then get the generic email first and use that as your contact address when you sign up for the domain.
Doing it this way is very important - there has to be an “admin” email address for any domain, to handle renewals and any technical queries, and if you use the domain-based email address or your old email address for this, you can get into a catch-22 if the new domain goes offline (e.g. if you forgot to renew it) whereby you won’t get any notifications and won’t be able to renew!
We’ve always had several domain names and email addresses and they can be set up either as mailboxes where you use webmail on the host itself (or access them via somethink like Thunderbird, which is what we do) or, as suggested, forward the emails to something else.
I think all this would be a lot more complicated that @Grumpy_OldMan needs, unless I’ve got that wrong.
When we set up our UK domans, we used Ionos and were paying for website hosting as well, because of the business. However, they seem quite happy to just act as email providers/forwarders, so we are altering our contract to remove the website hosting component. No idea of costs at the moment though. I’ll check with our French providers to see what they do…
I’m not a fan of Ionos either - it’s just what we had when we started the business donkeys’ years ago and it was to complicated to switch. We’ve a couple of French providers including Netim, which seems quite good so far.
Just a domain can be as low as a couple of quid per year, mail forwarding from a couple of quid per month if you shop around.
I prefer to host my own servers so I have a commercial ISP in the UK which gives me a small network of fixed and publicly routed IPV4 addresses and I rent a cheap dedicated server from OVH, prices start at just over £5 a month but you get a completely blank platform which you can do whatever you want with - however running and securing an internet server is not something I’d recommend if you are not already pretty tech savvy (to be blunt if you don’t know what ssh is, or a firewall, or how to configure one it’s not something I’d advise).
If £5 a month is too much then there are various free options from Amazon but, again, you need to be reasonably tech savvy.
The money isn’t an issue but I’m a bit confused, so say I get my own domain email @oldman.com then you say I need to forward that to a GMail, is that right? What’s the point.?
So for my bank you recommend changing that to a generic GMail or my own domain email?
Surely run them side by side for a time and see who continues to use the old email.
I think it’s always worth having more than one email. I’ve got orange and gmail. The gmail is where the rubbish goes (eg facebook notifications which I never look at as I’m never on facebook now) but also useful in an emergency.
I have an acquaintance who has continued to use btinternet for years here in France - no idea how he does it.
Would you not simply have the BTInternet forward to another account then have outlook or another mail app send them to a specific folder to identify which emails have been forwarded and then advise each sender of them new address of the emails you wish to continue to receive.
