About a month ago I decided it was time to retire my old Gmail account. The one I obtained during the invite only phase of Gmail Beta. Back then, I felt that jmetts would be a perfect email address to have, and I was able to get it before any other J Metts could claim it. Over the past year or two, a problem has developed. Gmail has become a default for most people to use, say, and write down when it comes to email addresses. Sadly, this means that many people don’t know the actual email addresses of their friends, significant others, and sometimes their own. Because of this, I started receiving emails for Jeremy, Janice, Julie, and every other J Metts in existence. So, long story short, it had to go.

A few years back, I picked up the domain metts.me while it was available, but have never really used it. I signed the domain up for Google Apps for Your Domain at the time when it was free for personal use, and it was still attached to Google Apps going unused. Perfect opportunity to change up my email to a nice personal email address, while still maintaining access to Google Apps such as Google Drive, Google Chat, etc. It was during this process I discovered how big of a pain it is to change and email address after 10 years of using the same one. Here is what I learned.

• You may think you are signed up for a lot of sites and email lists, but you are truly underestimating the actual number. A month into the change and I am still discovering ones that still need to be changed.
• Sending out a blast email to all of the people you care to have the updated email address doesn’t mean they will actually start using it. This will be a lengthy process of having my old account forward to the new, but only respond with the new until it catches on.
• The Google services you use are NOT easily transferred to a new account, and some can’t be at all.

To name a few.

• Google Drive, not too hard. Set up new desktop client, copy all old items into new folder.
• Gmail, not too hard. Set up new account to check old account as a POP account to transfer everything over.
• YouTube, a real pain! The only way this can be done is to associate the account to a Google+ Page, add your new account as a manager, wait 2 weeks, then transfer ownership of the page to the new account (still waiting the 2 weeks).
• Google+ has a transfer process, but it failed for me and shut me out of Google+ and Google Contacts for over a week.
• Google Wallet, forget about it!

It has been a process for sure, but it also made me think about giving my website another go. I’ll outline a few of the items in later posts, but for a quick look, I have divided the site into 3 primary sections.

• metts.words - The section you’re in right now, a place for my words
• metts.photos - My own personal photo curating site
• metts.videos - My Vimeo videos will post here, in a blog format