Diabolical trickery and sending email into limbo
By Charles Miller

Those of you who have followed this column in recent months know about me changing my email address. Several of my friends have done likewise at one time or another. The question is how to notify all your friends and family of the change of address.

In a recent conversation with a friend over pizza and a bottle of wine, we both recalled trying to notify everyone on our individual contact list, and how frustrating it was to have sent out the change-of-address notice only to have it ignored by probably 90 percent of the recipients. Months later, most of the people who had been notified were still trying to send email to the old address.

We agreed the best approach to changing email addresses, while not losing important emails that might come to the old address, is to keep the old email address alive for a while. Every so often, check the old email account to see which friends are still trying to use the old address. These will be the same friends to whom you sent the change-of-address notice, but never got around to updating their address books. You can then write back to them individually to remind them of the change of address. This individualized and personalized response is the one that seems to get the most results.

Both of us had to admit that we were as guilty as our friends, guilty of not immediately putting a change of address in our contact list when we received it. Everyone who uses email can relate to the excuse. Invariably when I receive a change-of-address notice from someone, I am busy and I say to myself, “I will come back to this later and put this new address in my address book.” Of course, the matter is immediately forgotten and the new address never gets recorded.

The question is this—if human nature dictates that nobody ever pays much attention to a change-of-address notice, how can you get their attention?

My friend who is a bit of an unconventional thinker came up with a diabolical suggestion. His idea involves just a little bit of work and some trickery on your part, but is almost guaranteed to get results.

In the program you use for sending email is always a place to enter your name as well as your email address. This is so that when you send email, the recipient will see your return address as “Charles Miller <faq7@smaguru.com>” in the email header. This option to enter your name is something some people omit from their configuration, in which case the recipient only sees “faq7@smaguru.com” and not your name.

My friend’s suggestion is to go into the configuration page for your email and change your name to make it appear the email came legitimately from someone else who is now the new user of that email address. Now when a friend writes to your old address, send them back a personalized message something like this: “Hello Susan. My name is Hot Rod. I got your email addressed to Charles Miller, but he is not using this email address any more. The dinner party you mentioned in your message sounds like fun. My business sells penis enlargement patches. If you could send me the email addresses for all your friends, I will tell them you personally recommended me and can offer you a 2% commission on all sales.”

This guarantees that the friend who earlier procrastinated will drop what they are doing and scramble to purge your old email from their computer without delaying another second.

Charles Miller is a freelance computer consultant, a frequent visitor to San Miguel since 1981 and now practically a full-time resident. He may be contacted at 044-415-101-8528 or email FAQ7@SMAguru.com.