Email naming conventions

 

When you get your own domain name, it’s a great idea to set up appropriate email addresses at the same time.  Deciding what to use for emails names can be error prone and without due consideration, can cause problems later.  The purpose of this document is to highlight these potential problems and offer solutions.

 

Let’s say your domain is xyz.com.  The prefix is the bit before the @.

 

It’s customary to have a default email address - one which strangers can send email to your company instead of an individual.  Smaller company’s may use mail@xyz.com or accounts @xyz.com.

 

There is a problem with this type of generic email address.  Spammers can attack your company without knowing a single email address.

 

You could try something clever or unusual and still be generic.  If your business is grocery you could consider shop@xyz.com of you are a dentist you could use smile@xyz.com.  If you sell cars you could use drive@xyz.com, one of our customer’s uses value@xyz.com and so on.  All nice and easy to remember but not one of the targeted standards.

 

Giving staff email addresses ensures a personal touch.  The problem here is what happens when they leave?  Someone else will need to take over their email address and add their account to their own.  Not serious but care needs to be taken as the new recipient cannot send email from the ex-employees email address.

 

It is important to use names which are easy to spell down the phone and easy to read.  You should avoud simmilar sounding letters such as m and n unless they are clearley in the prefix.  Something like brian@xyz.com is clearley easy to spell and hard to get wrong but something like mnmnm@xyz.com would be difficult for someone to pick up correctly over the phone.

 

If you tell someone your email address over the phone, they may write it down.  In cases like this is is known for someone to write down characters correctly but read them later incorrectly.  Characters like l, i, o, and 0 can be easally mis red.

 

The use of hyphens shoould be avoided because many people do not actually know what this is and wind up entering the wrong email address.  This is not good sherlock-holmes@xyz.com.  If you spell this to someone, chances are they will use sherlock_holmes@xyz.com.

 

A full stop is fine and can be used to seperate a forename and a surname in an email address such as sherlock.holmes@xyz.com.

 

Email address are always made up of lower case characters.  Upper case will work fine but are not used by convention.  sherlock.holmes@xyz.com and Sherlock.Holmes@xyz.com are seen as identical.

 

To sum up - avoid popular generic email accounts such as mail@ and info@.  Try to avoid using staff names particularly where you may have a high turnover of staff.

 

Colum Maguire, Megganet.