Forum FAQ - Changing your Email address

With so many cheap and free Internet providers, it's becoming quite common to change your email address from time to time. Also, companies will sometimes modify the exact form of staff email addresses. If your email address changes, even slightly, please remember to update your subscription. Apart from ensuring that you continue to receive forum messages, it is only subscribed addresses which are allowed to send any messages to the forum.

Remember, in line with the Guidelines, if your email or display name changes from how it has previously appeared on Forum, you should add a simple explanation of who you "were" if you subsequently post any messages or write to anybody privately.

The easiest way, which keeps all your Greenbelt subscriptions and options intact, is to send:

changeaddr my.old.address@old.isp.com
as the body of a message to majordomo@greenbelt-forum.org.uk, ensuring that you send the message using your new address. You will need to accept a confirmation token at both addresses, so make sure you do this before the old account is switched off.

Although you can achieve a similar effect by unsubscribing from each list and then and re-subscribing with your new address, this has a number of disadvantages. All of your options (such as replyto, digest, subject line tagging, etc) will be lost. Also, because you will be (as far as Majordomo is concerned) a brand new member, you will be subject to any restrictions which may be in place for new members, such as being able to read but not post for a few days.

Aliases

If you simply want to be able to post messages from two different addresses (home and work, for example, or from two slightly different variations of the same address), but only want to receive messages at one place, then send:

alias i.sometimes.send.from@this.address.com
as the body of a message to majordomo@greenbelt-forum.org.uk, ensuring that you send the message using the address which is actually subscribed to the forum (ie. where you receive messages).

If you find it difficult to set your mail program to use the actual subscribed address any more (though of course, it must have been set that way once for you to have subscribed!), then you can get the same effect by sending the two-line message:

default user actual.subscribed@address.com
alias i.sometimes.send.from@this.address.com
as the body of a message to majordomo@greenbelt-forum.org.uk. You may be asked to accept additional tokens, though.

Remember, in line with the Guidelines, you are only permitted to have a single identity on Forum. Therefore, if you do post from different email addresses it must be clear - either through your display name or signature - that such posts are originating from the same person.

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