Men With Pens: "New freelancers make a few mistakes that no one will tell you are mistakes, because they don’t want to offend you, or they may have already disregarded you because of this stupid mistake and don’t wish to become mired in the soup of your (sure to be squalid) company.
Now, I know your company is neither squalid nor soup-like, and I have no fear of offending you. I am, in fact, sure that I will offend you, but I embrace this honor with open arms and live not in dread.
Come now! We shall discuss the ineptitudes of others! (For I am sure that you do not do any of these things, and if you do, I am sure you will not admit to them until you have safely remedied them quietly behind the scenes.)
So. You need a professional email address."
8 comments:
I can't believe that people over 20 still have inappropriate email addresses. If anything I would be embarrassed that one of the first impressions someone could have of me would be sexygirl101@gmail.com or something of equally ridiculous nature. Many people are hesitant to switch their emails, but there are easy forwarding systems so that one will never have to worry about not getting emails from another account. It's a wise investment, do it.
I feel like this article should be addressed to more than just professionals..... I believe it should be addressed to anyone from high school on up. Honestly, if you need to email a teacher or professor about an assignment, are they really going to take you seriously with an email address you made up when you were 13? I think it is a really good tip to have your name in the address, just for clarity sake. It is amazing the number of high school and college students that have email addresses such as the ones mentioned in the article. You make yourself look so much better by changing that one simple detail.
I agree with Tiffany here, this article needs to be required reading in every high school freshman English class (at least that's where my school did their generic career counseling, other schools may have other times that they do it). I can't count the times that I've been trying to compile a show's cast into an email list or newsgroup and I've had at least 5 email addresses I simply could not copy over because they were SO complicated. Not only do these complicated and sentimental email addresses breed an air of adolescence, but they are extremely difficult to replicate properly when someone is trying to email you. I maintain a personal email that has some sentimental value (frontrowcenter5) and a professional one that I used for college applications and job apps (brian.rangell), and that separation a) puts me in the proper mindset to write a professional email when coming from brian.rangell, and b) pulls out the important work-and-school-related emails so I don't sift through junk mail to reach them. This is a process that works for me, and one I certainly encourage for others if they so choose.
When I was looking to get a new email address from google for future use for business or personal stuff, I found that I couldn't get my specific email I wanted which was basically my name. I had to try a few different combinations before I finally found something that would work for me. In the long run, I will most likely have a domian name with an email account attached to it so I can make whatever email address I want, and I can keep it professional.
First, there should always be a separation between personal and professional emails. At least I need the physical separation of inboxes from work things and personal things. Second, while we were all really clever as a child coming up with a really "cool" email address, we cannot expect to be taken seriously with an email that has no relation to your name. In today's world where entire decisions are made via email, being easily identified by your email is important. Also, any non-standard characters (or letter/number substitutions) will only lead to information not getting to the right person.
This is so true, and it saddens me that this is still enough of a problem that people have to write articles about it. I STILL have friends who are in the professional world with emails like this. I HAVE SEEN BUSINESS CARDS with the email "liltexascutie@gmail.com". If your email isn't come combination of your name and/or the name of your company, it should not be given to anyone or anything that isn't someone you met on Myspace.
One of the problems with trying to register, say, firstname.lastname@gmail.com is that if you have a common first name and last name, chances are someone already has it. However, it is now very easy to buy a domain name for yourself (or your company, depending on how you're doing things) and use google to host your email so you can have name@mycompanyname.com.
This...should be common sense by now. I hope. Maybe I'm just young and unsympathetic. Oh well.
I have personal email addresses, I have professional email addresses, I have email addresses that I give out for spam. But I keep each one separate and each one is appropriate to what I use it for.
On a completely different note, what people name themselves when they're 13 is one of the most interesting topics I've read about in recent years. Basically, the internet has artificially recreated a culture where children name themselves when they come of age. In a sense, we have our birth names and the names/identities we create for ourselves. There are large differences here, such as the effects of anonymity instead of an identity already established in a community, but the psychological effects are astounding. I have friends that are known only by their online handles; their created identities supersede their given ones.
I no longer use my screen name from when I was 13, but I prefer not to use my real name for any of my screen names because I feel RL and the internet are separate entities. Or course, this is not true in the general scheme of things and one has to be careful of the links between them. I should know. I use twitter.
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