Which is the best email??

[Martyn]

one of my best clients, a retail store, uses an aol account.
and he will never change even thought his employees laugh at him for it.

I have quite a few of those as well. One is a locksmith been running for 25 years and a care home for the elderly. Both have websites and a domain, strange.

 

[andcorptech]

We are in a small tourism area with alot of accomodation, guest houses, B&B and retreats.
Many of these use stay@businessdomain or relax@businessdomain

Gives a nice effect i think

 

[Martyn]

We are in a small tourism area with alot of accomodation, guest houses, B&B and retreats.
Many of these use stay@businessdomain or relax@businessdomain

Gives a nice effect i think

Yes good thinking.......

 

[Rocco]

I would agree with a computer technician requiring a @companyname email address. What do you guys prefer on this though? Which looks more professional and personable?

firstname@
firstname.lastname@
firstinitiallastname@
firstnamelastinitial@

or do you use the support@ sales@ approach?

 

[Brand]

I would agree with a computer technician requiring a @companyname email address. What do you guys prefer on this though? Which looks more professional and personable?

firstname@
firstname.lastname@
firstinitiallastname@
firstnamelastinitial@

or do you use the support@ sales@ approach?

I have always preferred the first.last@domain.tld

It is very clean and professional.

 

[Xander]

I have always preferred the first.last@domain.tld

It is very clean and professional.

Might be but, unless you think the customer will have your email in front of them, you want to avoid email address that they can't remember easily. "John.Smith@..." is one thing but "Devaughn.Dervervanderhoven@..." would be another. When in doubt, use something simple like "tech@..." or "service@...".

 

[YeOldeStonecat]

We follow the common convention of first initial last name @ company.com

Having "tech" or "support"...there are 4 of us techs, and each of us generally work with our own clients, we don't mix much. So doesn't make sense to use a "suppor@" or "tech@" mailbox.....because which freaking one of us receives that? Yeah I could make a public folder in our Exchange server for that...but now who spends the extra time checking that each day? So...direct name works best for us....because we cater to SMB clients and each of us 4 techs focuses on our own specific clients.

We do have some catchall common mailboxes....our office manager girl has her e-mail also accepting "acct" and "accounting" @ mail.

But for other places where you have a bunch of repair techs doing volume at a break/fixit shop....and you have a big sales floor with sales people doing lots of store front retail...yeah having "support@" and "sales@" starts to make more sense. Have a manager of each of those departments check that e-mail and dole it out to the troops.

 

[NYJimbo]

Always be sure to have possible variations of your email forwarded to your main email:

bob.smith@whatever.com

should also have

bobsmith@whatever.com
bob@whatever.com

etc. forward to the main name. Whatever you think customers will accidentally put in. If you have a domain name which has a tendency to get misspelled easily then try to
get that misspelled domain name as well.

We have a customer who has a name like bobsspecialservices.com
(not the actual domain) but also got him bobspecialservices.com and bobsspecialservice.com for the first year to see how many people screwed it up. He found people were getting it wrong and if he didnt have it they would get a return. Not saying everyone needs to do this, but if you have a domain name that can easily be misspelled then if you can get the misspelled names for the first year I would.

 

['putertutor]

For most businesses I prefer firstinitialLastname@companyname.com. But for mine I chose just firstname@companyname.com. I tend to have a more informal relationship with my customers and a fairly difficult to remember last name, so this works for me in my small town. In a larger city, I'd probably go with the more formal, but a little less personal, firstinitialLastname format.

We also have a lot of companies using the @localtelco.com adress, even if they have a domain. Many had email before their domain and either didn't think about transitioning their email addresses, or didn't know how to set up forwarding and were/are afraid to lose existing customers by changing email addresses.

For personal email, its gmail for me. My brother-in-law likes to brag about how he gets 5 email addresses from his dsl provider. I just chuckle and tell him I can have as many gmails as I want (at least I used to until they started the sms verification process recently. still I have about 15 I think), and can access it from anywhere without the crappy webmail interface of most telco's.