No, you don’t need one. The app you read mail in and the address mail is delivered to are two separate things, and changing the first leaves the second exactly where it was. Your clients keep the address they already have. Your IRS registration stays right, your website stays right, your letterhead stays right. From outside the firm, the morning after a switch looks like every other morning.
That last part matters more than it sounds. A real address change is one of the most expensive small projects a practice can take on. Bracing for one is the most common reason a firm never gets as far as trying anything.
- Your address belongs to the part after the @, and your provider takes delivery. An email app signs in and shows you what’s in the mailbox. The address stays with the account.
- Sending works the same way. An app that signs in to your mailbox sends through it, so the From line reads the way it always did. One arrangement changes that. It’s visible from the outside, and one message checks for it.
- A firm’s address is registered in a long list of places, and some of those entries carry statutory deadlines. A change of app leaves that list alone. That’s the biggest reason this switch costs less than the one you’re remembering.
- A recipient could notice four things: the From address, the display name beside it, your signature, and where a reply lands. All four are settled in the first five minutes. One message to yourself tests them at once.
- If your address really is changing, for a rename, a merger or a departing partner, that’s a separate project on a separate date. Doing both at once is how a two-week job becomes a two-month one.
Where your address actually lives
An address is a delivery arrangement. Somebody owns a domain. The domain points at a provider. The provider takes mail addressed to the names on it and stores what arrives. Your mailbox is that store. An email client signs in and shows you what’s in there. Which app you use is invisible to the mail system, the same way the brand of your filing cabinet is invisible to the mail carrier.
That’s why your mail stays put when you change apps, a point worked through properly in why there is no migration when you switch email apps. Who owns your address, and the one case where you can genuinely lose it, is can you keep your email address. This page takes the other direction. It’s about what the world outside your firm sees, and what you’d owe it if the answer were different.
The half that gets less attention is sending. Most owners accept that incoming mail keeps arriving, then wonder what happens on the way out. It’s a fair question, because outgoing mail is the half clients actually look at. The address travels with the account. Microsoft puts it plainly in its own documentation on aliases. “When the user sends email to someone else, their primary email address is what typically appears in the From field in email apps” (Add another email alias for a user, checked September 7, 2026). Note the phrase “in email apps,” plural. The account decides. The app displays.
The four things a recipient could notice
Everything a client sees about your mail sits in the top few lines of what arrives and the bottom few lines of what you wrote. There are four, and they’re worth one at a time. Three are settings. One is a genuine difference between products.
The From address. It stays what it was, for the reason above. It’s the account’s address, and the account keeps the one identity it has however many apps sign in to it.
One arrangement does change this, and it’s common enough to check for. Some tools skip your mailbox and send from their own servers on your behalf. Then the sending domain and the From domain disagree, and the mail systems on the other end say so. Google’s help page on the extra text beside a sender’s name gives the trigger exactly. The word “via” appears when “The domain it was sent from doesn’t match the domain in the ‘From:’ address.” Google is blunt about what follows, too. “You can’t remove the ‘via’ next to someone’s name” (Extra info next to sender’s name, checked September 7, 2026). Recipients on Microsoft see the same thing in different words. Google’s own page on sending from another address warns that if “your recipient uses Outlook or another mail service,” they may see “From yourname@gmail.com on behalf of othername@otherdomain.com” (Send emails from a different address or alias, checked September 7, 2026).
So you can settle this yourself rather than take a vendor’s word for it. Send one message and look.
The display name. The name printed beside the address comes from the account. Some apps keep their own copy, and that copy will happily go out as “sgibson” or as whatever your tenant was called in 2018. It’s a thirty-second fix, and a five-year embarrassment if nobody looks.
The signature. This is the one item on the list you carry across yourself, because a signature is stored by the app rather than by the account. Every app you’ve ever used held its own, and so will this one. Paste it in on the first afternoon. Check that the image in it, if it has one, actually rendered. It’s a small enough job that it deserves no plan. It’s worth naming because everything else here happens on its own, and this one waits for you.
Where a reply lands. A reply goes back to the address the message came from. That’s the address you already had. That’s the mailbox both apps are reading. It lands where it always did.
A booking link sits close to this list, and it’s worth separating out. It’s the one client-facing thing a new tool can genuinely replace. A booking link is a URL rather than an address, so it sits outside your mail entirely. Publish a new one, though, and clients holding the old one will hit it. The steady order is to keep the old link live until you’re sure, which is also the advice for keeping a trial invisible from the outside. Read what a booking link is actually for before you swap one.
The message you send to yourself
Here’s the whole outward-facing test for a switch like this. It takes under a minute. Do it on the first afternoon, before you use the new app for anything real.
Send one message from the new app to an address on a different provider. Your personal account works, or a spouse’s. Pick something outside your own mailbox. Mail between two addresses in the same account can stay inside the building, so it tells you little about what a client would receive.
Then look at what arrived and check five things.
- The From address is exactly the address your clients have, spelled the way they have it.
- The name beside it is your name or your firm’s, rather than a username or a leftover.
- There is no “via” and no “on behalf of” anywhere in the sender line.
- The signature is there, and any image in it rendered rather than showing a broken box.
- Your reply came back to the same mailbox and joined the same thread.
Five checks, one message, and the client-facing question is closed. Everything else about a switch is internal, which is the argument of what switching email tools really costs. The bill is hours of deciding and hours of learning, and it’s paid entirely inside the firm.
Everywhere a firm’s address is written down
The worry this page is answering is a sound one. A firm’s address is registered in more places than anyone can hold in their head. Writing the list out shows two things at once. It shows why an address change is genuinely expensive, and how completely a change of app misses it.
Registrations a regulator holds. For a firm that e-files, the IRS is explicit about the deadline. “Your e-file application must be updated within 30 days of any changes such as individuals involved, addresses or telephone numbers.” In the same breath, it adds that “Failure to do so may result in the inactivation of your EFIN” (How to maintain, monitor and protect your EFIN, checked September 7, 2026). Beside that sit your PTIN account, your state board registration, your registered agent filing, and your professional liability insurer. Each has its own form and its own clock.
Things clients hold. The address in every engagement letter you’ve signed. The invitation to your document portal. The entry in a few hundred client address books, and the filing rules those clients quietly built around it. The address printed on invoices and on letterhead. The card you handed someone at a chamber breakfast. Your website, your Google Business Profile, and the directory listing you paid for in 2019 and haven’t thought about since.
Things that authenticate you. The recovery address on the business bank account. The payroll platform, the practice management software, the e-signature service, the domain registrar itself. Every two-factor fallback in the firm ends at an email address. The day that address stops working is the day you find out which ones.
Things that send to you. Bank alerts, e-file acknowledgments, state agency notices. The portal telling you a client uploaded something. The payroll approval reminder. The quarterly calendar invitation from a referral partner who set it up once in 2021 and will never set it up again.
A change of email app leaves every line of that alone. Every form, every client, every recovery address, every printed thing stays exactly as it is. That whole list belongs to the account, and the account stays where it is. So the honest total for this switch is measured in the firm’s hours rather than in its paperwork, and the number comes in well under what most owners have budgeted in their heads.
What an address change costs, in the platforms’ own words
The other half of the same comparison is worth reading even if your address is staying put. It’s the clearest evidence available that these are two different projects.
Both platforms soften the landing in the same way. Google says that after an administrator changes a user’s address, the user will “Continue to get email sent to their old address, which becomes an email alias” (Overview: Changing a Directory user’s name or email address, checked September 7, 2026). Mail keeps arriving. That’s the good news, and it’s real.
Then Google’s own page on the impact of the change lists what breaks anyway, and it runs longer than most people expect. Users must “Update their Gmail filters to use the new email address,” and create new signatures. In Calendar, “Events that you create before you change a user’s email display the old email.” In Drive, previously shared items keep listing the old address. One line is worth reading twice. “If an app saves data based on the domain name or the user’s email address, the data is lost.” The next line follows from it. “The user must reinstall any Google Workspace Marketplace or App Engine apps that use OAuth” (Impact on Google apps when changing a user’s email address, checked September 7, 2026).
Microsoft’s version is the same shape. An administrator does it, rather than the person whose address it is, since “You must have an appropriate role, such as user administrator to perform the tasks described in this article” (Change a user name and email address, checked September 7, 2026). The change takes a while to land, too. “It can take up 24 hours for the new aliases to update” (Add another email alias for a user, checked September 7, 2026).
Look at that last Google item once more, because it inverts neatly. Changing your address is the operation that breaks the connections between your mailbox and the software attached to it. Connecting a new email client makes one of those connections, and leaves the address alone. The two get confused constantly, and they’re close to opposites.
When the address really is changing
Sometimes it really is. The firm renames itself. Two practices merge. A partner whose surname is in the domain leaves. You’re finally moving off an address your internet company owns, which is the one case where an address can die under you, and it’s covered properly in can you keep your email address. Or you’ve run the business on a consumer address for nine years and have decided this is the year.
Four rules. The first is the whole point of putting this section in a change management guide.
Keep it out of the same month as a tool change. The general case for changing one thing at a time is about being able to diagnose what went wrong. Here it’s sharper. If the address and the app both changed, every “did you get my email?” that week has two plausible causes. You’ll spend real hours proving which. The wrong one usually takes the blame, too, because the new app is the thing you can see and the address change is the thing you already forgot about.
Change the address first, then the app. Run an address change inside software your hands already know, with your existing filters intact and your existing habits available. Let it settle for a month. Confirm mail is arriving cleanly everywhere. Then look at apps.
Keep the old address forever. Both platforms hold it as an alias, and both do it for free. Microsoft states the limit and the price in one sentence. “You can create up to 400 aliases for a user. No additional fees or licenses are required.” On a small firm’s own domain there’s rarely a reason to take an old address back, and always a reason to keep it. Mail addressed to it is mail somebody meant for you.
Work the inventory in order of who has a deadline. Regulators first, because the IRS gives you 30 days and an inactivated EFIN is a bad week in February. Then anything that authenticates you, because that’s what strands you. Then the things clients hold. Announce last, once it already works.
The other addresses in the building
Most firms have more addresses than people. The ones that belong to somebody other than you are worth a moment before you connect anything.
Aliases and send-as addresses. Mail to info@, tax@ and your own name may all land in one mailbox. Incoming, that’s a provider arrangement, and it keeps working whatever app you open. Outgoing is the part to check. If you routinely reply as one of those rather than as your primary address, confirm the new app lets you pick the sending address. Then send yourself a message from each one you actually use. One thing is worth knowing before you lean on an alias for privacy. Google notes that “Aliases aren’t private and sometimes they’re visible to others.”
A genuinely shared mailbox. Whether the firm has one, who reads it, and what happens to a thread once somebody claims it is a firm design question rather than an app setting. How a firm inbox works when everyone can see it is where that belongs. The confidentiality half of it is using an AI inbox without breaking confidentiality. For an evaluation, start with one person’s own mailbox and leave the shared one for later.
An address on somebody else’s domain. A few clients issue their outside accountant a mailbox on their own tenant. That address belongs to the client, so connecting anything to it is their administrator’s call. Find out early. It’s the same gate that stops rollout mornings generally, described in how to roll out a new tool across your practice.
A second business. If you run more than one, each keeps its own address and its own domain. The live question is how they stay apart inside one app. That’s keeping one business isolated from another.
What to tell clients, and the message not to send
About the address, there’s nothing to tell them. Your engagement letter stands as written, the newsletter has other news in it, and a call can stay on the work.
The instinct to send something anyway is a decent one, and it’s worth holding. A note saying “we have upgraded our email system” answers a question nobody asked. It plants the idea that something might now be different about how they reach you. It creates the exact uncertainty it was meant to settle.
There’s a second reason, and for a firm that handles client money it’s the serious one. A message announcing that a firm’s email has changed is precisely the shape of the pretext that business email compromise uses. The FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center tells businesses to “Use secondary channels or two-factor authentication to verify requests for changes in account information with the intended recipient.” It also tells them to “Verify the email address used to send emails, especially when using a mobile or handheld device, by ensuring the sender’s address appears to match who it is coming from” (Business Email Compromise, checked September 7, 2026). A client who has been trained properly treats your announcement with suspicion, which costs them time. A client who reads it at face value absorbs the idea that your firm sends notices like that, and is marginally easier to defraud next spring. Both outcomes come out of a message you could have skipped.
Two things are worth telling somebody, and both are about something else. Your own team needs the two dates and one name to ask, which is the announcement described in bringing your team along. Whether your engagement terms should say something about AI tooling is a real question with a real answer, set out in what to put in an engagement letter about AI. That question has the same answer whether or not you ever change apps. Settle it on its own merits.
Changing to Point without changing anything outside
Point is an email client, and Point works on the mailbox your firm already pays for at Google or Microsoft. Connecting is a quick, secure sign-in, with no forwarding rules and no fiddly setup. Your address stays yours. Your archive stays where it sits, and your contact list comes with it, both in place rather than copied. There’s no Point address and no Point mailbox, so a client has nothing new to be given.
Two details make that easy to check rather than take on faith. The judgment Point forms is written into ordinary Gmail labels, and into Outlook categories. You can read how a message was sorted from the mailbox at your own address, in the app you already use. Filing works the same way in both directions. A thread Point files leaves the inbox on the provider’s side too. Whatever else changes, the account, the address and the mail stay where they were.
Signing in to Point is passwordless, so the switch arrives without a new password for anyone to write on a sticky note. Point is per seat, so people come on one at a time rather than all at once. If you run more than one business, each keeps its own address and its own lane inside the same app.
The one piece of housekeeping is the one this page named earlier. Your signature is held by the app, so paste it in and send yourself the test message. Everything Point can do is listed on the benefits page. The shape of a first productive week is getting value in the first week.
Common questions
Do I need a new email address to use an AI email client?
No. A client of this kind takes the Google or Microsoft sign-in your firm already uses and reads the mailbox already sitting there. Your address, your archive and your contact list stay exactly where they were. There’s one mailbox in the whole arrangement, and it’s the one you have, so there’s no address to issue and nothing for a client to be told.
Will my clients see anything different when I reply?
They see the same From address, because the address belongs to the account rather than to the app you happen to be typing in. The one thing to check is your signature. Every email app stores that itself, and you carry it across by hand. Send one message to an address on a different provider. Look at the sender line, the display name and the signature. That settles it in under a minute.
What happens to fifteen years of archived mail?
It stays where it is, because your provider has been holding it all along. A new client reads it back in place rather than copying it anywhere. Why that’s structurally true, rather than a promise somebody is making, is in why there is no migration when you switch email apps.
Do I have to update the IRS or my state board?
Only if the address itself changes. Those registrations record your address rather than the software you read mail in, and your address is staying as it is. If your address genuinely does change, the IRS requires your e-file application to be updated within 30 days of a change to information such as addresses or telephone numbers. It says failure to do so may result in the inactivation of your EFIN. That’s the deadline to work back from.
We are changing our firm name. Should we do the new address and the new app together?
No. Do the address first, on its own, in software your hands already know. Leave a month before you look at apps. If both change at once, every question about a message that went missing has two possible causes. You’ll spend a week finding out which, and usually blame the wrong one. Keep the old address as an alias afterward. Both platforms hold it at no extra cost.
Can I still send from info@ or from my other address?
Incoming mail to every alias on your account keeps arriving as it always did, because the provider arranges that and an app only reads what’s there. For sending, check that the app lets you pick which of your addresses a message goes out as. Then send yourself one from each address you actually use in front of clients. It’s the same one-minute test, run two or three times.
The short version
- The address belongs to the account, and the app is a window onto it. Changing which app you read in leaves the address exactly as it is, incoming and outgoing.
- A recipient could notice four things: the From address, the display name, the signature and where a reply lands. The signature is the one you do by hand, and it takes a minute.
- One message to an address on a different provider tests all four at once. Check the sender line for “via” or “on behalf of” while you’re there. That’s what a tool sending from its own servers looks like from the outside.
- The firm’s registration list stays as it is. The IRS e-file application, the PTIN, the bank, the portal and every client address book all keep the address they already have.
- A real address change is a different project with a documented breakage list, including third-party app connections that have to be remade. Read that list once and the difference between the two becomes plain.
- If the address is genuinely changing, do it first and alone. Keep the old one as an alias forever. Work the inventory regulators-first, because they’re the ones with deadlines.
- Send clients nothing about the address. A “we have changed our email” notice looks exactly like the pretext the FBI warns businesses about, and it raises a doubt the client never had.