A Bad Case of Mail-Practice

It’s not something we readily think about – but that’s why I’m here to bring it to your attention: never ever use your personal e-mail account for business/professional purposes.

It already peeves me when people solicit my e-mail box for business, but to do it from the e-mail address companypresident@yahoo.com? That’s downright unprofessional! Yahoo!, Road Runner or Hotmail have nothing to do with your business, so why should they be at the bottom of all your business proposals?

And no matter how hard you try to disguise your username (it’s the catchy part before the ‘@’ sign) it will still look unpro. DrComputer@yahoo.com looks just as unprofessional as Honestsales@hotmail.com.

This goes for academic protocols as well. I’ve heard many horrible anecdotes about students who send in papers to professors from emails like 69girl@yahoo.com or catlover@hotmail.com (insert crude jokes about the sender's personal life here).

The point is: the use (and abuse) of personal e-mail accounts not only sheds a bad light on the message itself, but leaves the recipient to question your credibility. If you want anyone to respect you and regard you seriously, then you should always put your best foot forward.

This article re-printed from Issue #4 of my newsletter.
Download the PDF at:
http://www.2scoopsrice.com/dd/designdouble_1_4.pdf

Comments

Well, except that not all businesses have their own domain names, or at least separate mail servers (they might have president@company.com, but that could just forward to their RoadRunner or Gmail account). And actually, I'm seeing Gmail used in business circles more and more often -- folks might have several accounts for different purposes. They have good spam filtering, they're accessible everywhere, and yes, they're disposable. (Especially useful to collect inquiries for a specific job listing, for example.)

For truly small businesses, I think, it just pays to be as careful with your e-mail address as you are with your business name. So, no 69girl@domain.com or HottIslandLuvr@domain.com, folks! I'll take companyname@yahoo.com over that stuff any day.

I have over a dozen email addresses that I use for different purpose mainly because of the never ending battle to combat spam. I absolutely hate spam and learned about spam the hard way, after my primary, personal email box was spammed to kingdom come. Being that it was a pop mail account too, meant that the spam physically downloaded into my computer. I hate that, because you had to always clean up the hard drive to get rid of this junk clogging your computer up.

So I opened and still use a series of yahoo and now gmail web based accounts. I direct most of my public posting and business oriented emails to the yahoo account because they do have good spam filtering and that none of the email actually goes in my computer. Just stays on yahoo's server until I delete it or in the case of reported spam domains, it automatically goes in the trash at the server level.

I now have my primary personal address limited so that only my close personal friends, relatives and associates can email me over there. The entire thing is set up with a white list and spam filter that tosses everything else out on the server level before I ever see it download to my computer. I like that even though it means some legit email may go to the byte bin.

I told my friends if you change your email address, cc me at one of my designated yahoo or gmail accounts so that I can update my primary white list to add you in.

Of course I tend to use my generic handle name in some fashion for my email addresses... macpro at yahoo.com for example, or a variant thereof.

I also have my own domain names and have specific email addressses used for them too of which only a few people know. And if they become spam problems I have the luxury of deleting the email user name and starting a different one at the same domain.

Which of course speaks loudly for anyone to have their own domain. Some places offer you like 50 email boxes for one domain, which I think is great.

So like you can be yourself in 50 different entities at that domain. How nice.

You all a bunch of blow hards.....

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