4
5

Personalized email (self.freelance)

submitted ago by trnga

I have been chatting with my freelance friends and researching the internet for advice on this subject. I am a freelance designer and instead of using an email address that is associated with a job, I'd like to have my own personalized email. I don't want rebeccasmith@gmail.com; I'd like to keep my personal mail separate from freelance clients.

Does it sound redundant to have rebecca@rebecca.com or me@rebecca.com ?

Any thoughts on this would be greatly appreciated!

all 20 comments
sorted by:
best
best
top
new
hot
controversial
old

[–]atrophying 2 points3 points ago

Mine is myfirstname@myfullname.com. I have a very short first name, however, and also use a catch-all on my domain so anything@myfullname.com comes to me. The latter is useful for tracking and filtering spam.

[–]randombabble 0 points1 point ago

Can you explain how to catch-all can track and filter spam? I thought it would create more spam since all emails come to you

[–]ViralInfection 1 point2 points ago

You get a lot of spam with a catch-all. This is different then what gmail provides, as an email can be suffixed with something. For instance: john.smith@gmail.com is also valid as john.smith+reddit@gmail.com. This all routes to the same email but is not a generic wild card. A catch-all would grab [anything]@domain.com and would route to the wildcard email.

I use a wildcard email, the spam is annoying, but I like it for testing and software development reasons. I'd suggest using gmail suffixes.

[–]arthousedirector 2 points3 points ago

I would recommend something along the lines of hi@rebecca.com, or me@rebecca.com.

I personally use myfirstname@mylastname.com.

[–]rj_inthe412 2 points3 points ago

I use hello@firstnamelastname.com - I just like how it's kind of an introduction. So hello@rebecca.com would be cool.

[–]MinisterJester 2 points3 points ago

I use iam@...

[–]-Sparkwoodand21- 2 points3 points ago

I use shout@firstnamelastname.com. I find it funny. Nobody else does.

[–]mjcov 2 points3 points ago

I've seen some people use jobtitle@fullname.com so like designer@johnfreeman.com, just to reinforce that you're emailing a designer. You can create a bunch of aliases so having multiple for multiple roles is good too. Though for my canonical address I use firstname@domain.com.

[–]falkencreative 1 point2 points ago

One thing you can do -- you have use a personalized email address that is at your domain name, but have it hosted through Google. That's the setup that I use, and it's worked out pretty well for me.

http://www.hongkiat.com/blog/google-app-mail-for-free/

[–]cupperoni 1 point2 points ago

Not redundant at all if you want to have separation between work and personal.

I use name@name.com for work-related contact outside of Basecampish required work.

[–]trnga[S] 1 point2 points ago

Oh Basecamp. How you flood my email so.

[–]mkaito 1 point2 points ago

I use me@mkaito.com. I don't think it sounds redundant. I've seen people use hello@whatever.com and contact@foobar.com. Or you could pull an old time reference and use smith@rebecca.com.

[–]trnga[S] 1 point2 points ago

awesome - thanks!

[–]ViralInfection 0 points1 point ago

I think the best implementation I've seen is:

name[@twitteraccount].com

It's good branding. Although so is first-last.com. Just pick one, flip a coin.

[–]lilburrito 0 points1 point ago

Well, if you own the domain rebeccasmith.com you can make any email@rebeccasmith.com you'd like. If you don't already have a website for your portfolio, you might as well make one anyway, it'll be easy to show people your work just by passing along the URL.

You can also register an email address at a site like mail.com, but you won't be able to get anything you'd like, you'd be able to choose from a list of domains.

[–]trnga[S] 0 points1 point ago

My site is my firstname.com - so like rebecca.com (Using a fake name as an example. My first name is pretty unique so I went with that for my portfolio site).

[–]lilburrito 0 points1 point ago

Oh, then yeah, you should be able to set up your custom email with your web host, I don't think it'll cost you anything.

[–]secretdark 0 points1 point ago

Might be worth going with work@rebecca.com and personal@rebecca.com? Just a thought.

[–]brandscaping 0 points1 point ago

using the catch-all gives you a ton of flexibility - when you meet someone at an event, tell them your email is theirname@yourdomain.com - they're more likely to remember that. I use "contactus@.." on my website, and "myname@..." for correspondence (my professional email) there is some additional spam with the catch-all, but the benefits far outweigh the negatives. Also - choose googleapps to do your backend hosting (requires a bit of configuring, but gives you some serious benefits.) I don't think they have a freemium version anymore, but for $5 a month on their started plan, it's pretty awesome (going on memory, but I think it's $5)

*edit because it was killing me to have the wrong there - will now forfeit my internet-grammar-police ID.

[–]trnga[S] 1 point2 points ago

thanks for the tip