Changing email address linked to Dropbox (complicated scenario)

Question

My wife and I shared a personal email address (verizon.net). She got to Dropbox first 🙂 and set up a Dropbox account under her name, with her files, linked to that address. I got to Dropbox later 😞 and set up a Dropbox account with my files under my name, using a work email address. My wife passed away recently. I would like to a) cancel her account, which I believe she was paying for (not sure of this) and b) rework my own account (which I am not presently paying for) so the files are associated with this personal verizon email rather than a work email that isn't guaranteed to last forever. Sales said I had to talk to support; the support chatbot was not helpful. I guess the ideal would be, cancel the old account, then associate my files with the verizon account, but is that doable? Thanks in advance for any suggestions you can give.

Rich · Accepted Answer

@snacattack wrote:I would like to a) cancel her account, which I believe she was paying for (not sure of this) and b) rework my own account (which I am not presently paying for) so the files are associated with this personal verizon email rather than a work email that isn't guaranteed to last forever.

First, I'm sorry for your loss.

Sign in to your wife's account and see if it's on a paid plan. You can check this on the Plan page. If if is, cancel the subscription. If you don't need any of the files you can just delete the account, which will free up the email address for use on a different account. If you want to keep the files, share a folder from your account to her account, then move everything from her account into the share. Make sure you can see the files in your account, then you can delete her account.

Once the account is deleted, you should be able to change the email address on your account to the Verizon email. I'd actually caution against this, though. I always try to avoid using an email address that could go away one day, like you mentioned for your work email. The same holds true with any email address from an ISP like Verizon, Comcast, Cox, etc. If you change your ISP, or if you move to an area not covered by your ISP, you lose the email address.

Get yourself an email address from a company that isn't likely to go away, such as from Google's Gmail or Microsoft's Outlook, and use those for services like Dropbox, et al. An ISP email is fine for communicating with friends and family whom you can easily update if the email changes, but if you lose access to an ISP email and try to sign in to a service, there could be security in place that would prevent you from gaining access (two-step authentication, security codes for unrecognized devices, password resets, etc.), and most wouldn't allow you to change the email without access to the old one (Dropbox is like this).