Replace an OLD address with a NEW one

[--VQ--]

Question: Asked by Marie Marston at Civilworks Engineers
Is there a Best Practice for replacing an old address with a new one?

Answer
Excellent question! Our answer applies to both vqNow and vqSA. [vqME users, see this instead]. This tip covers both a change of names (e.g maiden name to married name) or a change of employees for the same "desk" or function. For example, people writing to your support department may have saved a particular employee address in their address book. But if that employee leaves, they need to know the corrected address.

First, if you choose to announce a change of addresses, keep your email list short and clean! Send email only to individuals who have sent mail to your organization in the past 6 months (or 1 year, if your services are contracted annually) and only to addresses for which you have ongoing dialogue or recent opt-in permission. Never send a change-of-address email) to a broader audience. We will show you how to alert your more infrequent contacts below...

If you would like for someone to receive future mail addressed to a former user or an old address, make the old address an alias to any other user. To do this, log in to your to the vq-Admin account and click the current user. The alias entry field is near the top of the next screen.

This prevents mail from customers & contacts from being returned as undeliverable. You must also keep an alias or mailbox for the old address on your mail server. Then, do one of these things:

• Less Prferable: On your own server, make the new address an alias to another user.
  
• Better: Set the email program for one of your staff to check the old address along with their own mailbox

We prefer the 2nd option, because it allows you to inform senders of the new address and eventually retire the old one. To do this, set an autoresponder that tells the sender that mail was not delivered and asks them to resend their message to the new address. This makes it much more likely that the sender's address book will be upated.