Consulting Journal: Resources

Resources: Email address

by David Blakey

Having a professional email address can help identify you as a professional consultant.

[Monday 16 June 2003]

Website

You should have an email address that includes the domain name of your website. One of my email addresses is djb@consultingjournal.com. Another one is djb@blakeyconsulting.com. These email addresses give an impression of solidity.

You do need to own a domain name to do this. You may have your website hosted by another company, so that your website name will be yourname.thehostname.com. This does not create a strong impression, so it is better to register yourname.com and then have your host set up your site so that it can be visited using a URL such as www.yourname.com. You will then probably be able to set up email addresses such as you@yourname.com that will be redirected to your email account.

There will be two service providers involved here. There will be your website host and your ISP. The ISP will provide your email account.

ISP

You will have an email address supplied by your ISP. Mine is djblakey@slingshot.co.nz, because Slingshot is my Internet service provider. If you get an email message from me, and I have sent it using my email client and my ISP, then the X-Sender field will probably contain djblakey@pop3.slingshot.co.nz. Most people will not notice this, so my From field can contain djb@consultingjournal.com. If you wish, you can use the email address provided by your ISP or you can use additional email addresses provided by your ISP. I also have djb@slingshot.co.nz.

Redirection

A third form of email address involves redirection.

I also have email addresses such as djb@poboxes.com, which is the one that my friends use. The way in which this works is that djb is a single user of the domain poboxes.com, which is owned by NetForward. For a small annual fee, NetForward will redirect all mail addressed to djb@poboxes.com to my ISP mailbox.

djb@poboxes.com does not carry the same impression as djb@consultingjournal.com. If you work for a large consulting firm, you will have an email address that does look respectable. If your business is smaller, then you may not have a domain name that you can use for your email. I advise you to get one. Above all, avoid using an email address that looks cheap.

Collection

Finally, there are collection services. Instead of forwarding your email, they hold it. You can log in to read it. Two of the most well-known of these service providers are Yahoo! and Hotmail. I have no doubt that Yahoo! and Hotmail offer excellent services. I just do not expect to see them as part of the email address on a professional consultant's business card.

You may still have these ‘unprofessional’ email addresses. If you travel, it may be convenient to have all your email forwarded to a mailbox that you can read easily while you are away from home. The points that I want to make are that your clients should see only your ‘professional’ email address and that you should be careful of responding from an ‘unprofessional’ email address.

Here's an example of that last point. When a message to djb@consultingjournal.com has been forwarded to my personal mailbox, my email client - Eudora - uses that To field to set the ‘personality’ for my reply to that email. When I click on the reply button, my new message is created, with the From field as djb@consultingjournal.com.

My ISP allows me to collect my email messages in two ways. First, I can use an email client to download them from my mailbox. Second, I can log into the ISP website and read my email messages on a Webmail page, using a browser. My account is set up so that messages are deleted from my mailbox whenever they are downloaded to my email client. As a result, the Webmail page shows only the latest messages. Reading your email messages using a browser is useful when you are away from home.

Summary

There are several convenient ways of setting up email addresses. The address that you use for business must appear to be professional. You should may sure that you always reply to business email using that email address. If possible, you should automate this, as I do with my Eudora personality.

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