By Lou Dolinar
Updated Feb. 14, 2006

Were I any less public a person, I would have changed my e-mail address years ago to avoid the unavoidable spam that comes with an e-mail account that's been widely known for years.

There are other reasons you might want to change your e-mail address - a change of providers, for example, or switching jobs. The tools you learned about last week - how to forward e-mail and access multiple accounts - give us what we need to look at some scenarios for changing addresses on the Internet.

Let's start with something simple: a new job. If you even fantasize about a better position - particularly if it is with a competitor of your current firm - you should set up a new mailbox outside the corporate firewall.

To state the obvious, when you leave your job, you can't take your e-mail address with you. Your company might be kind enough to forward mail for a while, but don't count on it. Sure, you can bulk-mail all your regular correspondents and hope they update their address books. Still, there's a more reliable approach that you can implement gradually.

Say your e-mail address is dolinar@newsday.com. The way most people set up their e-mail accounts, that address is automatically saved to the recipient's address book when he or she replies to a note from you at that address.

Now suppose you also set up an external e-mail address: lou@dolinar.com. As we showed you last week, you can either forward that address to dolinar@newsday.com, or you can set up your e-mail program to open and download both mailboxes at once.

The next trick, however, is to change your return address on the corporate account to lou@dolinar.com. That way, when your "official" correspondents reply, their mail automatically goes to your personal mail box.

In Outlook Express, you'll find this option under Tools/Accounts/Properties. Just change the "reply to" address, not the actual e-mail address. Most e-mail programs give you similar options, as do Web-based e-mail systems.

The beauty of the setup is that it works seamlessly and invisibly. Someone sends an e-mail to dolinar@newsday.com, and they end up with a second entry of lou@dolinar.com in their address list.

It used to be difficult to leave AOL in similar fashion because AOL used nonstandard mail services. You had to use official AOL e-mail programs or employ an aftermarket product like ENetBot to move their mail to a standard mailbox. No more. Any mail program that supports IMAP (Internet Message Access Protocol, a more the advanced form of e-mail than standard POP), can open an AOL mailbox. For how to set this up, go to http://help.aol.com/help/supportcentral/supportcentral.do and select the email option.

Assuming you've switched to broadband, you can can continue with all AOL services via their "bring your own access" plan.

Multiple mailboxes can help you deal with spam, too. The basic theory here is that any time you buy goods online, respond online to an ad, or otherwise give away your e-mail address, there's some chance the e-mail address will be acquired by a spammer. Thus, the only addresses you should give away should be disposable.

There are excellent commecial solutions here.

Take a service like ChoiceMail (www.digiportal.com); you can get it via subscription or through some ISPs that license it. It enables you to set up and manage dummy e-mail accounts that you use for responding in situations where you might be picked up by a spammer.

If one of these boxes starts piling up spam, you delete it. Meanwhile, you restrict your personal correspondence to another mailbox that uses a so-called "challenge-response." To get to you, an e-mailer has to be listed in your address book or respond manually to an online prompt that foils automated mail systems.

Still, you don't have to spend money to use this anti-spam trick. A while back, a number of readers reported very good results when they simply created a couple of dummy accounts for commercial mail. Most ISPs, for example, will give you three or more accounts for family members. Just use one of these and delete it if attracts spam.