Don't use an address containing an obvious name, spammers/junk mail use that to target your account. Start making a list of all the accounts and people that will need to know your updated email.

Raye: when you say an obvious name, do you not using your own name? Not sure what you mean by that.

I bet over 90% of the professionals I do Internet business with use their name in their email address.

The spam emails I receive don’t go to the account with my name on it. The spam usually goes to the email addy I use when I register for forums, social media or shop.

friend uses the icloud. I have had a gmail account forever... and had several different internet providers since 2000.

I have a ****other@yahoo.com that I use for amazon and all places I "have to give out" an email account. Greatly cuts down on spam in my "regular" email.

I am still using Yahoo. While you may not have bills, doctors offices, pharmacies that send reminders when things are due if you do once you have your new email address you might want to start notifying them. If you have set up with your bank to notify you of suspicious activity that is another place that you will need to change. It is similar to starting over with a brand new phone number no matter if you think you have contacted everyone there will be ones that you forgot or the correction did not update.

Using a mnemonic or an acronym not a recognizable name will decrease the likelihood that you will get spam targeted for the gender of the name.

I don't think email spam is as common as it once was, especially if using an email host that has an active anti-spam effort. Between that and thoughtful internet use, my experience is that the likelihood of getting spam is quite low.

My real email address is my real name@gmail.com. It's a male name. I never get spam emails. None at all. The only thing even remotely resembling that is what I'm sure others experience - when making travel reservations or other such things, and using my email for the confirm, I'll start getting marketing messages from that same business. It just takes one click on "Unsubscribe", as every legit business offers in plain sight, to end those.

I also don't get spam at the yahoo address I use for sites like this. There was a time that Yahoo's anti-spam abilities were quite poor compared to Google's for gmail, but they seem to be close to on par now, both being very effective. Or, fewer spam messages get sent. Whichever it is, the result is the same, they're not ever in my inboxes.

We have our own domain, and we have several "aliases" for emails. DH set up the aliases to track where spam was coming from. The only spam I get is when a friend's email is hacked.

My experience has been like Elmer's. I have never had an email account with a service provider. It always stuns me when a contact notifies me with, I have a new service provider so here's my new email. I am like why?

I use a Gmail account with my real name. No spam problems. I use usernames with free accounts like Yahoo and Hotmail/Outlook for social media. don't worry about spam. That's what filters which catch over 95% of it and the delete button on for.

I've had a yahoo email address that predates gmail, but now I have a gmail address as well. I've also had a hotmail address that also predates gmail, and I got that one because the only email that gets into my inbox is from people in my address book - everything else goes into the spam inbox, and I check that also to see if anything arrives there that I want to transfer to my address book. I use the hotmail address for any commercial transaction that I do and expect to get put on their mailing list.

I do not think it is unreasonable to have three email addresses, and I used to have more - one was German, another Italian, and the third was French, and they were all on yahoo. I had separate identities for each of these because of yahoo groups that I wanted to join. Back then, I used yahoo messenger, and I would get simultaneous messages from my different identities. At least once I was carrying on a conversation with one person in German while carrying on another conversation with a different person in Italian. I think it helped my language skills and also made it easier for me to switch between German and Italian. I really do not like instant messaging any more, and I do not use it on facebook either, which I seldom visit anymore. As it turned out, the person I was chatting with in German was American, and he also lived in Los Angeles, and so it would have been much easier for us to have chatted in English, but it took us a while to realize this. I've had similar experiences in Mexico (and Costa Rica) with phone calls that I would start in Spanish and eventually realize that I was speaking with an American - or in the case with Costa Rica, a German who spoke English much better than he did Spanish.