Sally Jenkins

I’m in the middle of switching email addresses – and it’s causing me a lot of grief!

I’ve used the same web mail address since we got our first home PC back in 1999 and for most of that time it’s worked fine. But over the last few months the service has been crashing out, refusing to load my inbox and freezing when I press ‘send’. I’ve been reluctant to switch to a new provider because:

•  I liked my email address (it didn’t include any annoying numbers or dots to make it unique from every other person with my name)
• Like most writers I always have ‘stuff out there’ which obviously has the old address on as a contact point
• I guessed it would be a lot of hassle to change

However, there was only so many times I could put up with losing a carefully drafted email plus we’ve recently upgraded to BT Infinity at home – so I decided to bite the bullet and join the @btinternet.com clan.

I was lucky with my new email address – all I had to do was slip in my middle initial to make it unique and still appear businesslike. Then I jumped for joy when I saw that it was possible to import contacts from other email providers – but sat down heavily again when I realised my old provider was not amongst those listed as compatible. It looked like I had a long ‘copy & paste’ job ahead of me.

But there was good news when I found an option to get mail forwarded from other email addresses. I filled in the prompts and clicked ‘new mail only’. At least now it wouldn’t matter if I forgot to keep monitoring my old email – all those competition wins that are bound to come in over the next few months would be automatically forwarded to @btinternet.com!

Then, before my very eyes, my new inbox filled up with over 2,000 emails.

Every single email from my old address had been imported to the new!

This had advantages and disadvantages. I could open messages and click to add the sender to my new contacts list but a massive deletion job is now necessary. And I’m not finding it easy to delete whole page after whole page because I keep spotting something that might be useful…just like when I try sorting out books for the charity shop.

Somehow I reckon this job is going to drag on and on. Maybe it would be easier to go back to sending messages via pigeon or even in a bottle (which explains the odd illustration to this post – just in case you were wondering!)

Despite all this I can still be contacted via the ‘About Sally Jenkins’ page of this blog or please leave a comment below.