After more than 20 years of operation, Gmail looks set to add a new feature for which users long have clamored: allowing users to change their email address.
Quietly, Google is rolling out a system in which users can adopt a new email address while retaining all their data on their accounts from services such as Google Drive and YouTube.
The move, first reported in a Google Telegram group , has been greeted with praise in online technology forums , both by those who have changed their names and want their email to reflect that and those who have been stuck with emails based on youthful jokes for more than a decade.
But there's a catch.
As of Tuesday, the Silicon Valley giant had not announced the new policy, and the change currently is only reflected on the Hindi-language version of the Google support page, though the site indicates the service will expand in the future.
"Important: The ability to change your Google Account email address is gradually rolling out to all users, so this option may not be available to you right now," an English translation of the support page says.
Google's English language support page still says that "If your account's email address ends in @gmail.com, you usually can't change it."
According to the Hindi-language page, Google is allowing users to swap their email address by turning the old email into an "alias," through which the account is preserved and the information is forwarded to the new account. Other email providers, like Yahoo and Outlook, have offered aliases for years.
Users will be able to use either their old or new emails to sign into Google applications, including Gmail, Google Maps, YouTube, Google Play and Google Drive, according to the Hindi-service page .
The new feature does have limits. Users can only change their account names once every 12 months, and only three times overall, for a total of four emails.
Google did not immediately respond to a request for comment and to questions about when this feature might be available to users in the United States.
This article originally published at Google may finally let users change their email addresses - but there's a catch .
