When opening a company one of the first things you should do is choose an email provider. My favorite is Google Apps for Work. You can also use Zoho Apps if you are a small business and want a totally free solution.
Once you’ve got your mail set up you want to set up individual email accounts.
Personal Email Accounts
Each person in the company should, of course, have their own personal email address that they can use on a daily basis for internal and external communication. This is the email address that they can put on their business cards and also use for logging into the various tools that the company uses.
Tools like Slack are now aiming at killing email for internal communication, and they’re having a great of success. However, email is not going away anytime soon as there are many more uses for it apart from internal communication.
For personal email accounts I recommend using this format:
In my case, for example, I would use [email protected]. If the person has a really long name or surname you can use the shortened version or even set up an alias to that account. For example, you can have the mailbox named [email protected] but then also set up an alias for [email protected] and emails sent to that alias will also end up in the person’s inbox. This also applies to people who have a name that’s hard to spell.
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Some companies prefer to just use the firstname@ option and omit the last name. This works for very small companies but you will soon run into problems when the second Joe joins your team. You’ll soon end up with a mess, with some people using their first name only and others having to use their first and second names or something unsightly like joe2@.
My recommendation is, therefore, to start right away with the firstname.lastname@ combination. If you get two people with the same first and last names, you can use introduce the initial for their middle name or something similar. For example if you have two people named Joe Smith in your company, the second one can use [email protected].
Generic Email Accounts
Next, you will want to set up a few email accounts to be used for mostly administrative, support, billing and as a first point of contact with your company. Make sure you cover all the business functions of your company.
Here are a few essential ones to start off:
- admin@ for administrative purposes such as being a Google Apps admin
- support@ for your helpdesk
- billing@ for billing and payments
- hello@ as a general point of contact
- careers@ for job applications
- domains@ for domain management