Usually not — and if you do, the migration is only worth it if you change what you do next. A new address handed to the same few hundred organisations ends up in exactly the same state within a few years. Abandoning is genuinely right in two situations: the account is compromised, or you're starting a new chapter anyway and there's little to migrate. Otherwise, fix the habit rather than the address.
What the migration actually costs
People underestimate this consistently, so it's worth being concrete. For every account you own:
- Log in — which requires remembering you have the account at all.
- Find the email setting, which is in a different place on every site.
- Change it, and confirm via a link sent to the new address.
- For anything you can't log into, run a password reset — which goes to the address you're abandoning, so you must keep it alive.
- For anything where the reset also fails, open a support ticket.
Most people have three to five times more accounts than they'd estimate. How to find out how many
The usual outcome is abandonment around account thirty, leaving a half-migrated state that's worse than not starting: two addresses to check, neither complete, and no clarity about which service uses which.
Why it doesn't fix the cause
The spam arrived because a large number of organisations held one address, and some of them shared, sold, lost or were acquired. None of that was about the specific string before the @.
Issue a new address to the same set and the same process runs again. You've bought a few quiet years at the cost of a large migration, and you'll be making the same decision again later.
The two cases where it is right
If someone else has had access, that's a security problem, not a spam problem, and speed matters. Move, and treat everything that used it as potentially exposed.
New job, new business, moving country — situations where there's genuinely little to migrate because the accounts don't exist yet. Starting clean costs almost nothing here.
In both cases, the important part is what you do with the new address: never hand it out directly. Give each organisation its own address from day one, and the new one stays clean permanently rather than for four years.
The better option in most cases
Keep the address. Stop issuing it.
From today, every new signup gets its own address. Your existing one continues receiving mail from the organisations that already have it — that doesn't get worse, because they already have it — while every new relationship is on something revocable.
Then migrate opportunistically rather than in a batch: when a service emails you anyway, spend sixty seconds moving that one account. Within a year everything that matters has moved, because the things that matter are the things that email you. The full routine
If you decide to move anyway
- Set up per-service addresses first. Otherwise you're repeating the mistake with better handwriting.
- Audit what depends on the old address before touching anything. How
- Move the critical accounts first — bank, government, primary email recovery, anything financial.
- Keep the old address alive indefinitely. Don't delete it. Forward it somewhere you'll see, because something you forgot will surface in eighteen months.
- Never give the new address to an organisation. It exists for people, and as the destination your aliases forward to.
More: after a breach specifically · the system that prevents the repeat