Common mistakes you should avoid when creating an email address in 2018

By Shekhar Sahu on 11 April 2018 9:23 PM

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".

How to create professional email address to avoid embarrasment

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

ShekharSahu@domain.com or SahuShekhar@domain.com or ShekharS@domain.com etc. 

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.

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



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