my wedding Wednesday: changing my email address & tutorial

I should start by saying that I consider myself a super-user of most Google products (I have an obsession).  Anyway, I recently got the following email from a friend who had recently gotten married. 

Question:

I needed some help with Gmail and was hoping that you could help me.  How did you change your gmail address? Do I need to open a new account or could I link a new alias to my existing account.

She said my response was helpful, so I thought I would reprint the same tutorial here for others:

Response:

You have several options, so it depends on what you want to do.  The steps below will 1. get you a new account and 2. make it look like your email is sent from your new account, all while bringing it into your same inbox you have always used with your old account.  

 

Here are the steps for the route that I took:

1. Do you want a new email that includes your new name somehow (let's call this Mrs. S)?  
2. If you want a new email address, then go on gmail and open a new account with a new handle (e.g.mrs.S@gmail.com or LS@gmail or whatever you want).
3. Go into your new account and hit "settings" in the upper right corner
4. Then choose "forwarding and pop/imap"
5. Then under forwarding (the first box) - select "forward a copy of incoming mail to" and then follow the instructions from there.  You might not want to have the email in both accounts... so you can delete the copy in your new account, archive it, or keep a copy in your inbox, it is up to you.
6. Then come into your old account "miss.S@" and then click "settings"
7. Click "accounts and import"
8. Select "Send mail as" and enter your new address.

Does this make sense?  If you want to do a variation of this, feel free to ask!