When you reach college or start working at an organization or become a freelancer, the once "cool email address" now becomes an "embarrassing funky email address".
Honestly many of us have been there and done that, when we are new on the internet, we never foresee how and when our email addresses become an important part of our identity. This post will help the folks who just got started with the internet and people who regret choosing a non-professional email address in the past and are looking for tips to make a switch.
Here are the top don'ts to consider when choosing a professional email address
1. Choosing an unpopular email provider
Unless it's your own registered domain name or a company provided domain name, stick to the famous email accounts like Gmail, Hotmail, Outlook, Zoho, Yahoo, and a few others. Also avoid the ancient email accounts like AOL, Rediffmail etc. This will also prevent your emails from getting into someone's junk or spam emails.
2. Having your favorite movie, game character
In fact, the world doesn't want to know which sports club or political party you support, are you a cat person or a dog person, which anime character you look like. Having character names along with your name is a BIG NO in a professional looking email id.
3. Including affectionate words
I agree that you are like an angel, cool or sweet but we all are fed up to see online accounts with usernames like Angel Priya, Dhinchak Pooja, Sweet Sally, Cool Karan, Mr Perfect, or names including Cute, Cutie Pie, Beauty, Beautiful or Beast.
Honestly many of us have been there and done that, when we are new on the internet, we never foresee how and when our email addresses become an important part of our identity. This post will help the folks who just got started with the internet and people who regret choosing a non-professional email address in the past and are looking for tips to make a switch.
Here are the top don'ts to consider when choosing a professional email address
1. Choosing an unpopular email provider
Unless it's your own registered domain name or a company provided domain name, stick to the famous email accounts like Gmail, Hotmail, Outlook, Zoho, Yahoo, and a few others. Also avoid the ancient email accounts like AOL, Rediffmail etc. This will also prevent your emails from getting into someone's junk or spam emails.
2. Having your favorite movie, game character
In fact, the world doesn't want to know which sports club or political party you support, are you a cat person or a dog person, which anime character you look like. Having character names along with your name is a BIG NO in a professional looking email id.
You have social networks and microblogging platforms to do that.
3. Including affectionate words
I agree that you are like an angel, cool or sweet but we all are fed up to see online accounts with usernames like Angel Priya, Dhinchak Pooja, Sweet Sally, Cool Karan, Mr Perfect, or names including Cute, Cutie Pie, Beauty, Beautiful or Beast.
Having such email ids in long run will only make the mockery out of you. Let's keep those words for communicating with your friends and beloveds in the informal settings only.
4. Including a number, birth year, birth date, year of joining, street number, phone number
Our parents didn't give us a name which is unique in the population of 6 billion. There is a very high chance that your name is already taken. When for a person (myself) named Shekhar Sahu, the usernames with a combination of Firstname and Lastname such as
is not available, the email providers suggest some auto-generated names like
ShekharSahu22@domain.com or ShekharSahu1950@domain.com
Which seem to be the only choice at that time. But give it a thought instead of numbers you can include your profession or the area you belong to such as
ShekharSahuAuthor@domain.com or ShekharNutritionist@domain.com or ShekharSahuIndia@domain.com
Here you can be creative and still sound professional. This not only gives you a unique email address but also opens up opportunities to share information about what/where you belong to and to grow your business.
5. Having too large or too short username
Using just initials doesn't help identify a person, or having a too large email address to remember is a big turn off. Such large emails will not even fit in most of the web forms or modern databases. You also don't want to break or hold the record for having the largest email address.
4. Including a number, birth year, birth date, year of joining, street number, phone number
Our parents didn't give us a name which is unique in the population of 6 billion. There is a very high chance that your name is already taken. When for a person (myself) named Shekhar Sahu, the usernames with a combination of Firstname and Lastname such as
ShekharSahu@domain.com or SahuShekhar@domain.com or ShekharS@domain.com etc.
ShekharSahu22@domain.com or ShekharSahu1950@domain.com
Which seem to be the only choice at that time. But give it a thought instead of numbers you can include your profession or the area you belong to such as
ShekharSahuAuthor@domain.com or ShekharNutritionist@domain.com or ShekharSahuIndia@domain.com
Here you can be creative and still sound professional. This not only gives you a unique email address but also opens up opportunities to share information about what/where you belong to and to grow your business.
5. Having too large or too short username
Using just initials doesn't help identify a person, or having a too large email address to remember is a big turn off. Such large emails will not even fit in most of the web forms or modern databases. You also don't want to break or hold the record for having the largest email address.
Please stick to 5 to 15 characters. If your company administrator automatically truncates your first name and last name and adds some numbers to auto-generate the email addresses you may like to share this article with him/her.
6. Including special characters
Unless the special character is a hyphen - , a dot . , or an underscore _ separating FirstName, LastName or Profession, don't use any special characters in the email address. It may get ambiguous to have such names with or without the special character in someone's address book or contact list. It will also be difficult to remember.
Bonus Info
Gmail ignores any occurrences of dots "." in the email ids.
for example, emails sent to
Firstname.Lastname@gmail.com or Firstna.meLastname@gmail.com etc
will be forwarded to
FirstnameLastname@gmail.com only.
Now we will agree, having a neat and professional looking email address is the new cool.
Have you come across any other common mistakes in the email address that I have missed? I would like to hear from you.
Shekhar Sahu
shekharsahu.co
Hand Picked Related Posts
How to create custom rules to filter messages to different folders on Hotmail/Outlook automatically?
Create a temporary email address that auto destroys itself
Where did Cool Hotmail go?
Photo by Bruce Mars from Pexels
6. Including special characters
Unless the special character is a hyphen - , a dot . , or an underscore _ separating FirstName, LastName or Profession, don't use any special characters in the email address. It may get ambiguous to have such names with or without the special character in someone's address book or contact list. It will also be difficult to remember.
Bonus Info
Gmail ignores any occurrences of dots "." in the email ids.
for example, emails sent to
Firstname.Lastname@gmail.com or Firstna.meLastname@gmail.com etc
will be forwarded to
FirstnameLastname@gmail.com only.
Now we will agree, having a neat and professional looking email address is the new cool.
Have you come across any other common mistakes in the email address that I have missed? I would like to hear from you.
Shekhar Sahu
shekharsahu.co
Hand Picked Related Posts
How to create custom rules to filter messages to different folders on Hotmail/Outlook automatically?
Create a temporary email address that auto destroys itself
Where did Cool Hotmail go?
Photo by Bruce Mars from Pexels
0 comments for this post