[dorongrinstein]

Email is portable. You need to use your own domain. If you use Gmail.com as the domain it isn't reasonable to expect yahoo can serve a Gmail domain. That's not how the internet works. There's a very easy and common solution - buy a domain for $10/yr and use email providers that let you bring your own domain. It is portable by design.

[aniketsaurav18]

I second this. If you are using @gmail or @yahoo, you dont own anything; rather, you are renting an address on their server. @gmail.com is Google's property. But if you own your domain, it's your property. You can change the Domain registrars just like you port your phone number.

[pllbnk]

You could have said the same about using a GSM provider's SIM card back in the day. Yet, now we can easily switch the provider without changing the number.

[pllbnk]

"That's not how internet works" is as powerful an argument as "That's not how GSM works". Buying a domain and setting up a new email address won't help you when you have been using your @gmail.com for the past 20 years and want to stop being dependent on Google.

I have bought my personal domain and started using my email address 8 years ago and I still haven't managed to move everything away from my old gmail because sometimes it's impossible without recreating some accounts from scratch.

[atrettel]

What services have you not been able to change your email address for?

I have done the exact same process over the last few years --- moving from Gmail to a my own domain --- and I have found only around 10 services that did not let me change my email address. I view that as a success personally.

[beardyw]

I have gone the opposite way. I got my personal domain email before Gmail. Having mail coming into various other places I centralised them by automatically forwarding to a Gmail account. Now Gmail has become the account that gets used! Ah well.

[mlhpdx]

It would be like each telcom having its own area code and expecting to be able to move a seven digit suffix from one to another. That’s a closer analogy to how email works.

[homarp]

one is the cell phone you got from work, change employer, change phone number. The other is your private cell: it costs more, but it is your number.