Unlocking a New Digital Identity: Why It's Time to REFRESH Your Email Address

Because behind each email address is a marker of the person you are and the image you project, coupled to the mailbox that may be cluttered with successive dead ends and demolished passions. Every so often, it pays to stop and think about why this email address still fits you, and if it needs sprucing up. So if it’s been ages since you last thought about your email address, it’s definitely time for a change. Here’s why an email refresh can be so life-renewing.

Is Your Email Address a Blast from the Past?

Think about how you felt when you got your first ever email address. You could pick from all kinds of nicknames, your favourite bands or incorporate memorable digits. Once you’ve embarked on that journey, you’ve probably discovered that your digital identity needs to evolve too. An email that was once an expression of your zeitgeist might now feel stodgy or out of character with whoever you are now. If your email doesn’t reflect your present realities or the image you’re trying to project, it’s a sure sign that change is long overdue.

The Struggle to Recall: Making Your Email Memorable

How about the day you realise that no one figured out your email? Or better yet, the baffled look on someone’s face as they write down your email, only to ask for your email again five minutes later? When I get asked for it a second time, I know the person can’t decipher my email the first time. If your email is a Rubik’s Cube, don’t be surprised when you can’t make sense of it. Another problem with long emails is that they can be confusing. Why are there more than a thousand different email addresses on the network? It all goes back to our ‘five-minute’ teenage selves, when we tried to be different — different for the sake of difference. If your email is a Rubik’s Cube, don’t be surprised when you can’t make sense of it. Short emails are not only easier to remember — they also reduce the chance for misunderstanding.

A Career Evolution: Your Email Should Follow Suit

Career changes are inevitable. You might have transitioned companies and divisions within a large corporation, crossed over into a new field in a drastic change of direction, or you might have finally converted a side hustle into your main gig. Whatever the case, your email address needs to evolve with you. Even if you like your current email, keeping an address that isn’t aligned with your primary professional affiliation can feel like showcasing a discordant layer of your past. Updating your email can help to convey a more fully fleshed-out professional portrait.

Battling the Inbox Overload: A Quest for Clarity

It’s cold comfort to think of your inbox as a reflection of your life Aside from the obvious waste of time it represents (you really might have agreed back in 2001 to buy some Viagra), a crammed inbox of spam and free-trial junk is the enemy of productivity, especially when it’s connected to one of your older email addresses: your digital past, the particular target of marketing machines the world over. The only way people can get hold of me for work is through email. Every approach to my professional inbox is precious. So cutting loose the old digital ghosts of my work life is a deliberate act in favour of my future productivity – only the important stuff is going to explode up that screen, so that I can deal with it. Your inbox is your self-portrait. It’s cold comfort to think of your inbox as a mirror because, as the German poet Rainer Maria Rilke once said, your body ‘does not consist of organs, but of blessings’. The inbox is not your body.

Embracing a Fresh Start: The Joy of Renewal

Beyond pragmatism, the ritual of changing email addresses can be powerful; it may be the moment to gather the griefs of left-behind selves and to reinvent some new and different future in your own imagination. You will clean out the digital garage – and even if you can’t, it will feel cleaner – and you can start again. Changing an email address will give you better privacy. You can control who gets a connection to your digital self. It even allows you to compartmentalise the many different worlds you inhabit, to create an email address for work, for family, for close friends, and for casual encounters.

Open to Change: The Benefits of a New Email Address

Revising your email address isn’t a chore. It’s an invitation: an openness to declare that your email address should conform to the ever-evolving self. It is an act of regaining dominion of the profile that’s uniquely yours. It’s a declaration of intent that you’re more accessible, or you want to be. It’s a planting of a seed of freshness, or renewal, perhaps just a beginning.

Understanding 'Open'

The very notion of being ‘open’ goes beyond the literal-minded ‘refresh your email address’ definition. It’s about being ready to grow, to change, to move on. This is a baby step in the direction of presenting a truer version of your identity, of making your digital footprint more alive and accessible to those you intend it to be, and safeguarding the here and now from the detritus of the then.

Your email address is your portal into the world. It is a way of starting conversations, opportunities and connections. Make your email a representation of the now, an invitation into the future and an affirmation of the evolving story of you.

Time for a change. A fresh start with a new email address.