With wedding guests in town, I’ve had more conversations than I can count — and only one involved technology. A good friend in from Tennessee asked if I could write a column about moving off of AOL and onto a more secure email service. She said her father’s AOL mail account gets hacked frequently, and to make matters worse, he still pays around $20 a month for his account — something that has been free for more than a decade.

If you’re an AOL customer, switching to another email provider is long overdue. You’ll reduce your security risks and save $240 or so a year, and surely, you have better ways to spend that money!

Here, I’ll tell you how to transition to a new Gmail account and cancel billing for your AOL account. But first, there may be a handful of readers who may need to keep their accounts. If you pay for internet service through a provider such as Verizon or Comcast, you do not need to pay the monthly fee for AOL, which is for those who do not have access to internet and must use a dial-up connection. Even in that case, satellite should be available in your location, which will provide much faster and reliable service.

You may want to keep your AOL mail account, and that’s OK as long as you update your settings to the most secure ones possible. In the upper right corner, open the dropdown that reads “Options” and click on “Account Info.” On the left panel, choose “Account security.” Change your password to one that is long, nonsensical and has never been used by you anywhere else. Because AOL is still a favorite target for hackers, you should keep this password an AOL-only one, so that it cannot be used to access any of your other accounts. Make sure to enable two-step verification, which will require you to type in a code from your phone to login. This will make it much more difficult for an unauthorized person to get into your account.

Are you paying for dial-up service that you don’t need? In the past, AOL was notorious for making it difficult for customers to cancel their paid accounts. Now you can cancel your billing by logging into your account, clicking “My Services | Subscriptions,” clicking “Manage” and then “Change Plan.” Scroll to the bottom of the page and select “Cancel My Billing,” choose a reason for cancelling from the dropdown and then confirm your cancellation. This will not close your email account.

It’s hard to let go of an email account that you have used for many years, but you can do it. Create your Gmail account. You’ll add your first name, last name and username, which will be the first part of your new email address @gmail.com. Type in a password with a minimum of eight characters that uses a mix of letters, numbers and symbols. Write this down now. Next, add your phone number, a recovery email address, your birthday and gender. These facts will not be shared. You’ll then receive a text to verify your account (two-factor authentication). Type it in and your new inbox will open.

You may be concerned about losing your contacts, so let’s start with that. Look for the nine-square array in the upper-right corner of your inbox. Click to open and select the “Contacts.” Click on “More” to see the “Import” label. Select AOL from the popup, agree to use ShuttleCloud for the import and then agree to give Google access to your account. In just a minute or two, your contacts will all be listed in your new Gmail account. Using the array again, go back to Gmail.

You are now ready to forward new AOL emails to your Gmail inbox. Go to your settings by clicking on the gear icon, which will open a dropdown. Select “Settings.” Look for “Accounts and Import” across the top of this page and open it. Find “Add a mail account” and click to open a small window where you’ll type in your AOL email. You may select either “Link accounts with Gmailify” (which will leave a copy of the emails on your old account) or “Import emails from my other account” (which will not leave a copy on your old account). Go to your inbox and refresh the page. You’ll see all of your AOL folders are in your system. You’ve lost nothing and gained a big shot of security. As a last step, send an email to friends, colleagues and family to let them know about your new email address.

Leslie Meredith has designed international websites and now runs marketing for a global events company. She writes about personal technology. You can email her at asklesliemeredith@gmail.com.