Discussion on:

Tips for choosing your professional email address

Chip at Camden Software. Or you can use my formal name, Sterling. They both work.

When you hire into a company, they usually tell you what e-mail address you will get. That's fine for most uses, but what I have found is that as employees come & go, their registrations at different vendors & customers still have the old address. Of course, when someone leaves, you would simply forward the incoming mail to a supervisor or other active individual, but you still have the task of correcting all of those john.doe@... entries out there.
So for any situation where you want your company's relationship with another to continue, it'd be best to set up John Doe with his individual address, but also as a member of a group like Purchasing@... DevelopmentManager@ or some other functional description. Then after John leaves, you simply switch another individual into John's old slot and you don't need to go out and do all those corrections.

Every start ups and those who are in business but don't know the professionalism in web would find this information very useful!

try CompuServe. Can't get any more retro than logging in every day to check your mail at 56K. XD the awkward moment when it seems that website is STILL being maintained!

Chip- NIce article with great advice. It seems logically and that everyone should know this, but we all make bad choices and I've seen consultants and small businesses do every one of the don'ts that you listed. Thanks!

Brad Egeland

> So, how does your email address compare with these criteria?

Your description of criteria perfectly matches my own take on the matter. Unfortunately, the .com for my domain is already taken (but not actually used, evidently), so I went with singularit.us for Singular IT, LLC. I got as close to the ideal as I reasonably could. Maybe the .com domain name will open up in the nearish future.

edit: By the way, Andr??a Coutu (who wrote 7 terrible secrets revealed by your email address ) evidently doesn't know that one should Use RFC 2606 Example Domains For Example Emails.

Your impression about .com is valid in that it specifies commercial business, and not necessarily US based. Unfortunately, it is becoming very difficult to find available .com names and .net is the only alternative despite your bias against it. As a new Aussie company, we were unable to find MyDomainName.com because a German company had already taken your advise and registered 15 domain names that were similar and pointed them to their site.

"There???s nothing wrong with registering the same domain in several TLDs and redirecting them all to the same address, though. In fact, it???s a good way to keep other people from using your business name."

Thanks for crowding us out by advocating a form of cyberquatting which is both illegal and unethical.

.

> Thanks for crowding us out by advocating a form of cyberquatting which is both illegal and unethical.

Illegal . . . where? Laws are not universal.

Unethical . . . maybe. I guess it depends on how you target your domain name acquisitions and why. If that German company doesn't operate in Australia at all, and grabbed the .au domain, I'd say that might well be unethical. If it just grabbed the .de and .com domains, however, I don't really see a problem.

15? Seriously . . . ? I can't even figure out what fifteen top-level domains it would have gotten. That's a helluva lotta domains.

Cybersquatting was made illegal by the passage of a US federal law in 1999 known as the Anti-Cybersquatting Consumer Protection Act. The law became necessary because numerous large companies were forced to pay large sums to buy their domain names from third parties.

"Cybersquatting, the practice of buying up a domain in order to profit from a trademarked name, is prohibited under the 1999 Anticybersquatting Consumer Protection Act as well as a set of international guidelines called the Uniform Domain-Name Dispute-Resolution Policy. Disputes are usually mediated by the National Arbitration Forum or the U.N.'s World Intellectual Property Organization."

The German company involved is called Endmark (not even same name) and has registered 15 domain names, yes seriously, that are similar to theirs, (including Andmark). They CANT register the .au name Endmark, or Andmark because of the Australian requirement for an office located here.

My point being that advocating the registration of multiple domain names by the author is only encouraging this counter productive business practice.

The "cybersquatting" that is illegal in the US is not the same as the practice Sterling described.

late edit: Actually, a company with a trademarked name that buys half a dozen domains related to that name and runs across one other guy who has a similar domain he isn't really using is then more likely to be able to sue that one guy for "cybersquatting" under the US law than someone just getting into the market is to be able to sue the big company with the trademarked name that is buying up all the domain names. It's a ridiculous law and, ultimately, achieves an effect roughly opposite to what you seem to think it does.

Why is AOL so bad???

It's been a while since you graciously posted this link and since I posted my article, but I'm surprised how many people email me to say they are offended by the idea that people shouldn't share email addresses with their life partners! I have no care at all for how people manage their personal affairs, but, really, if it's your business, you want to look as professional as possible.