Switching email addresses

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  canwetalkmentalhealth · Member · Mar 24, 2020 at 6:04 pm

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  Hi, I have this blog/account and I do not want it anymore. Instead, I want to use this email address as the main email address on my sites I do want to keep, which are currently under a different WordPress account using my old email address (which I currently still have access to, but would like to phase out). Can I close this account and then use this email address for my other WordPress account?

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  supernovia · Staff · Mar 24, 2020 at 9:13 pm

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  Hi there,

  Can I close this account and then use this email address for my other WordPress account?

  Closing the account will not immediately free up the email address, since it would be held for 30 days prior to being completely cleared.

  Have you thought about using an alias? For example, instead of using this:

  (email visible only to moderators and staff)

  Use this:

  (email visible only to moderators and staff)

  You can make that +1, +whatever, +doesnotmatter … whatever letters or numbers make the most sense to you. Gmail will ignore the plus sign and anything after it. But we won’t, so it’s in effect a second email account that delivers to the same address.

  Want to give that a try? Once you confirm the change, the address will be freed up for the other account.

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  canwetalkmentalhealth · Member · Mar 25, 2020 at 3:28 am

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  Waiting 30 days isn’t out of the question, and would be preferable to setting up a new gmail account. Or did you mean I can just add the +whatever in WordPress and that’s enough (I wouldn’t have to do anything in gmail)?

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  kokkieh · Staff · Mar 25, 2020 at 6:18 am

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  You can just add the +whatever to the email address in your WordPress.com account settings, yes. This is a built-in alias feature of Gmail, and they’ll see it as the exact same address, so any emails sent to that address will still land in your inbox. But our system sees it as a different email address,

  As soon as you confirm that address change (in this case both the emails to the “old” and the “new” account email will land in your Gmail inbox), the original Gmail address will be freed up so you can use it for your other WordPress.com account.