Bad decisions and bad programming, that’s why.
I agree 100%.
You should be able to change the email address associated with any of your online accounts.
Emphasis on the word should, since not all online account providers allow you to do so. And in those cases, it can be a very big problem.
Here’s what to look for.
Changing your email address with a service
You need to change your email address, but the website won’t let you. Incredibly frustrating. Some services simply have no way to do it, leaving you stuck with an old address or forced to start over and lose everything. There are no simple answers; it’s just bad design, plain and simple.
Email as identifier
It’s common for online accounts to be completely identified by your email address. Some sites have both a username (like “Leo”) and email address (like “leo@askleo.com”), where the username identifies your account, but many sites use only your email address as your username.
When you sign up with somerandomservice.com, you provide an email address and a password. When you want to sign in to somerandomservice.com again in the future, you provide your email address and password, and you’re in. Easy peasy.
But what happens when you need to change your email address? Or worse, what happens when you’ve lost access to that email address?
It depends on how robust the service is.
Help keep it going by becoming a Patron.
Changing email address
Many, perhaps even most, online services are set up to handle this case, as it’s so common.
Typically buried in your account settings, perhaps alongside security and other settings, is your email address, which you can change. (Be certain to scour all the available settings if you don’t find it immediately.)
The mechanics vary, but in general, you:
- Sign in to the online service (somerandomservice.com in our example).
- Provide a new email address.
- Respond to a confirmation sent to the old email address to confirm the desire to change.
- Respond to a confirmation sent to the new email address to confirm you got it right.
- Start using the new email address to sign in to your account.
Again, easy peasy.
Except when the service provides no mechanism for changing your email address.
Lost email address access
What happens if you’re switching email addresses because your old one is gone? Maybe you moved out of the ISP’s service area, maybe it got hacked, maybe you’re just permanently locked out for whatever reason.
Sometimes the second step above — a confirmation sent to the old address — doesn’t happen. If that’s the case, the process remains simple:
- Sign in to the online service (somerandomservice.com in our example).
- Provide a new email address.
- Respond to a confirmation sent to the new email address to confirm you got it right.
- Start using the new email address to sign in to your account.
Done.
But what if that second step is present? What if a confirmation email is sent to an email address you no longer have access to?
Then, to put it gently, you’re probably screwed.
Related
How Do I Get an Email Address for Life?
Tired of changing your email every time a service shuts down or your ISP changes? Learn the smartest way to secure an email address that’s truly yours for life, and why relying on free or “lifetime” promises could leave you stranded.#30699
Customer (lack of) support
The general advice once you’ve reached this stage is to reach out to customer support.
In rare cases, they can help. They’ll probably use some other information to confirm you are who you say you are, and then they can change the email address for you.
But I did say “rare”. More common are either of the following:
- There is no customer service.
- There is no mechanism for changing the email address associated with the account.
That the latter one is even possible in this day and age floors me. And yet the original questioner confirmed with customer support that the email address to the online account could not be changed. Period. A new email address meant a completely new account.
Unacceptable. Email addresses change, after all, and you shouldn’t lose your online account at somerandomservice.com because of it. It’s bad design, bad programming, and bad customer experience.
Starting over
If you can’t change your email address with a service, you have two options.
- Keep using the old email address if you can.
- Start a new account with your new email address. This typically means losing everything in the old account.
Of course, there’s a third option: stop using the service. Unfortunately, that’s not always practical.
Do this
This is a difficult one to plan for and a difficult one to recover from.
The only real advice I can offer, beyond what I’ve described above, is to use an email address you’re unlikely to ever need to change. Typcally that means an email address on a domain you own, like I own “askleo.com”1. Email addresses I create on that domain are mine as long as I own the domain, which I expect will be the rest of my life.
Subscribe to Confident Computing! Less frustration and more confidence, solutions, answers, and tips in your inbox every week. (I’ll even let you change your email address to it, should you ever need to. 
)
Podcast audio
Footnotes & References
1: And somerandomservice.com, for that matter.
gee, why just delete the account and start over?