Google Finally Lets You Change Your Gmail Address – But There’s a Catch – The Gadgeteer

ARTICLE – Your Gmail address was supposed to be forever. That was the deal. You picked a username in 2006, maybe something clever, maybe something you regret, and Google made it clear: this is your identity now. Every login, every YouTube comment, every Drive folder, every password recovery, all of it chained to a string of characters you chose when you were nineteen and thought “coolgamer247” was a reasonable professional decision.

Google’s official position used to be blunt: if your primary Google Account email ends in @gmail.com, you “usually can’t change it.” The English help page mostly talked about changing non-Gmail addresses or switching account setups. That language persisted for years, which is why people historically had to create whole new accounts, or rely on alternates and aliases, if they outgrew an old Gmail handle. What changed this week is that Google’s…