The methods of electronic communications have greatly expanded over the years, giving folks many reliable choices.
Texting, FaceBook Messenger, WhatsApp and, in organizational environments, Slack, Teams and Google Chat are all popular applications. Despite all of these alternatives, however, good old-fashioned email is still the most popular means of electronic communication. With that in mind, your email address is an important consideration that many seem to overlook.
First of all, any organization needs to have domain-specific email addresses. Even single-shingle, mom-and-pop shops should have a customized domain and addresses at that domain to convey an air of legitimacy. Put another way, a business that uses a gmail.com, yahoo.com, outlook.com, icloud.com or similar just seems shady.
Why? Well a domain name itself costs less than $20 a year, and an email account in that domain will cost around $5 per month. If you can’t afford those costs, why the heck should I trust you with my business? Furthermore, application suite providers such as Google and Microsoft make it easy to set up their products with a custom domain name. And, if you use their products with a custom domain name, it’s exactly the same, from a technical perspective, as using gmail.com or outlook.com.
Certainly, there are exceptions to the rule. For example, “Hawaii ‘your profession here’@gmail.com” can be catchier and perhaps provide greater cachet than a domain specific address. Such examples, though, are few and far between.
What about personal email addresses? Well, here the rules get a little fuzzier. Amusing addresses, nicknames, variations of sports teams or slang are popular. These might backfire however, if you are trying to do personal business and give an appearance of seriousness. Financial or legal professionals, for example, might look at you sideways with such an address.
For personal addresses, most are free, and gmail is still the service du jour. Old-schoolers still might have a Hotmail or even an aol address, but most of those folks understand the humor in using such a service.
A lot of those folks keep those addresses because they’ve had them for so long. Much like mobile phone numbers nowadays, everyone has the same one they got when they turned 15 years old.
In that vein, some folks use the email account they got in college. Many schools, including UH, allow former students to keep their .edu address. Some folks use their address as a way to demonstrate their fandom of the school’s sports teams, although the implication is that you are either still in school or working for the school, which could be misleading. Cynics claim that colleges and universities allow such use to increase donations.
Finally, some folks have “throwaway” accounts that are used occasionally and only for specific purposes. Such accounts tend to attract a lot of spam. The bio for this column is an example of such an account.
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John Agsalud is an IT expert with more than 25 years of information technology experience in Hawaii and around the world. He can be reached at jagsalud@live.com.
