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 [email protected] or [email protected] (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.
In 2004, when Gmail was introduced, your email was just your email. Now, people use their email addresses to log into Netflix, pay bills, read the news and pretty much everything else they do online. Gmail is the key to the cloud storage platforms that hold our photos. And Gmail itself has changed: Generative artificial intelligence has become more integrated into the platform.
The change that Google announced on Wednesday had been in the works since last year. Earlier this year, Google quietly started testing the change, which was noticed by users of a “Google Pixel Hub” Telegram group.
In the old days, people were stuck with their Google email addresses. This caused an issue for people who got married and changed their names, or fell out of love with that one Gin Blossoms song and also needed to look professional when applying for jobs. To get the email address you wanted, you had to start a new account from scratch.
Dar-Wei Chen, an engineer who lives in Fayetteville, Ark., still uses an email address that includes “Soy Sauce” — named after the basketball player Philip Champion, who is known as “Hot Sauce” — and 81, the jersey number of one of Mr. Chen’s favorite N.F.L. players, Terrell Owens. This all made sense in 2004.
“I mostly use it for people with whom I’m comfortable enough to let see that disastrous handle,” Mr. Chen, 35, said in an email sent from a different account.
He said he wasn’t interested in changing the address, which he has had since around when the platform started, because his family and friends were used to it.
“I wouldn’t want to cause confusion,” Mr. Chen said.
Mr. Pichai’s announcement would have been useful more than a decade ago for someone like Bailey Moon, a 29-year-old legal analyst in New York City. She excitedly set up her first Gmail account when she was in middle school. It had “Miss Poopy” in the handle, because, well, she once had a bodily function go wrong in the years before that. When she was in high school, Ms. Moon’s mother suggested she get a new account. She did have to apply to colleges, after all. But that didn’t stop her from once accidentally emailing a teacher from the Miss Poopy account.
But Google’s announcement has not made Ms. Moon interested in accessing her old account and changing its name.
“I don’t want my legacy of Miss Poopy to carry on to the new account,” Ms. Moon said in an interview.
Regrettable usernames, of course, are not the only issue. Brandon Wenerd, the publisher of the website BroBible, opened his Gmail account as a sophomore at Pennsylvania State University. He picked a username similar to the one Penn State had assigned him for his college email address, which included his initials and a seemingly random sequence of numbers. At the time, Mr. Wenerd thought the Penn State username format gave him gravitas. He later regretted that choice.
“Whenever I graduated college, and was looking for whatever my career trajectory was going to be, I really was mad,” Mr. Wenerd, 40, said. “I was really bummed out.”
But Mr. Wenerd also is not sure he is going to change his username.
“This is the dilemma,” he said. “I’ve had it for so long that it almost like it feels like it’s a part of my identity now to have an email address that makes no sense.”
Jasper Craven, a freelance journalist, chose to include “Geeky Hunk” in his Gmail address in middle school (Mr. Craven, 33, who is based in Brooklyn, has written for The New York Times). Signing up for the account, he recalled, was a “major step in my development.”
“I sort of just tried to define myself, but in a way that felt universal and that I sort of had it all,” Mr. Craven said — though, he noted, the “descriptor does not fit who I was at 13, which was a chubby theater kid.”
If you do plan on changing your email address, remember: Google limits users to one new address every 12 months. If you’re like Mr. Craven, you may have a nostalgic attachment to an old username.
“I probably have three or four different email accounts that chronicle different moments or eras in my life,” Mr. Craven said. “There’s something nice,” he added, “about having these closed-loop repositories of your life.”
Sopan Deb is a Times reporter covering breaking news and culture.
The post Goodbye ‘Geeky Hunk’? Gmail Users Can Now Change Their Usernames. appeared first on New York Times.
