Choosing an email address

Get the best possible email address for your purpose

There are a few rules governing the characters you can use in an email address and length of prefix which differ form provider to provider. Best stick to a common sense format, use alphanumeric and numbers only and keep the prefix below 16 characters.

Suffix

The suffix is the part after the @. This will be either, your domain (@megganet.com) or a generic one (@gmail.co.uk, @outlook.com). If you are using this for professional purposes, you should have your own domain and you should use it. Using generic domains is unprofessional and demonstrates a watering down of professionalism.

Prefix

You can (and I believe, should) get witty with this. If the email is for someone who is not leveeing the company then by all means use a personal reference (forename@, forename.surname@, Forename.Surname@ etc). Yes, we now do capitals.

It is possible to have generic prefixes (mail@, sales@, email@, dispatches@ and so on), which are great if there is a variety of end users accessing the email address.

Also, feel free to use more relevant ones such as smile@ if you are a dentist, shop@ if you are a shop, beef@ if you are a butcher, welcome@ for a B&B, pictures@ for a photographer etc.

General advice

Make sure the email address is easy to spell and easy to read down a phone to someone else.

Try to avoid characters which can be misread for something else such as a ‘zero’ and a capital ‘o’. Also try to avoid l, L, i, I and 1. Also avoid using alphanumeric characters which have accents – stick teo the regular alphabet.

Using popular email prefixes (mail@, info@) should be avoided if possible as they are used by spammers by default. When spammers detect a domain, they automatically attempt to spam it with the typical list of popular email addresses.

Putting your email address on a website might cause spamming. Spammers send out spiders and other crawlers to harvest email address which are written in plain text on a website. One way to get round this is to have a picture of your email address instead of the text of your email address but spammers know to check the link of objects on a web site. A professional web designer will use a javascript to hide this information from spammers.