NYT Users who have been saddled with now-cringe email handles since the mid-2000s can now change them without losing any data under a policy Google announced on Wednesday. There is a light at the end of the tunnel for those who thought it would be hilarious, in the mid-2000s, to make a profanity, a body part or a song lyric part of their Gmail addresses.
Google announced on Wednesday that people who set up usernames in their less-mature days that they have lived to regret now have the option to change them without losing access to their inboxes.
Or, as Sundar Pichai, Google’s chief executive, said on X, Gmail users could “ say goodbye to v0t3f0rp3dr02004@gmail.com or mrbrightside416@gmail.com (or whatever you were into at the time).”
The change comes more than two decades after the launch of Gmail, now the world’s largest email platform. In that time, there has been a seismic change in the way the public interacts with the internet.