Google Changes Gmail After 22 Years -- Why You Need A New Email Address

Here we go again. The latest furor from Google's decision to allow Gmail users to change their original email addresses for something less embarrassing or more age appropriate does not solve their email problem. And worse, it leaves users with a serious issue -- Gmail's 2 billion users all now need new email addresses. This option to change Gmail addresses is not new. But its higher profile is new. The U.S. rollout has grabbed attention, not least because Google's CEO fronted the PR campaign. "2004 was a good year, but your Gmail address doesn't need to be stuck in it," Sundar Pichai posted. "Say goodbye to v0t3f0rp3dr02004@gmail.com or mrbrightside416@gmail.com." Now you can "go to your Google Account settings and choose any name available," albeit your old username continues to work. If the core objective is to move past legacy names, enabling millennials to ditch school and college email addresses for something more suited to people with jobs and families, then it ticks the box adequately. But that's not the real problem with email -- Gmail's platform or any other. And that problem is not fixed. Anyone with an email address dating back to 2004 can be certain it's now listed in countless databases used daily by countless marketeers and scammers. But the same is true if your email address only dates back to 2014 or even -- and here's the crux -- 2024. As soon as you start to use a new address, it's game over. "An email address used to be permanent but now it's finally editable like a username, which is a huge shift in how identity works online," says ESET's Jake Moore. "But until Google creates a 'hide my email' equivalent to what Apple offers, users may be better off creating a separate email address for multiple sign ins." For those wholly unfamiliar with Apple's ecosystem, Hide My Email enables its users to create throw-away addresses for new sign-ins or checkouts. These email addresses can be ditched at any time, meaning your real address does not get stored in those lists, which cannot be redressed once it has happened. "With Hide My Email, you can generate unique, random email addresses that forward to your personal inbox automatically, so you can keep your personal email address private," Apple explains. "You can change the email address that receives forwarded messages at any time. Or you can choose to turn off email forwarding to stop receiving messages. You can manage your addresses created with Hide My Email in Settings on your iPhone, iPad or on iCloud.com." This is what's needed. Putting embarrassing names aside, there's little point in changing your email address if you can't use this as an opportunity to tidy up your inbox and to stop giving away your primary email address to almost anyone who asks. You wouldn't do that with your phone number -- for good reasons. The other issue Gmail users face is that with Gmail's new address change option, "old addresses will still work as aliases," Moore warns. "This sounds helpful but potentially increases impersonation and phishing attacks." Google does have a Hide My Email option in development, albeit that's been the case for some time and there's no sign of general availability. There are games users can play with Gmail addresses to create proxies, but this doesn't come with any user management in any platform or OS, and so fails as a real-world alternative. Google has missed a trick. Had it launched the option to change Gmail addresses alongside a Hide My Email offering, it would have been an exceptional move. New addresses could be protected, solving all problems at once. That's a major opportunity missed, and so Gmail's 2 billion users are still left exposed.