What is the best email address for a personal website with my name as the .com domain name?

Question

I convinced one of my creative friends to finally purchase his own name as a domain name and start a portfolio. It has been years coming, but mission finally accomplished. Now I am helping him build his website.

For my own personal website, I registered pflanz.me and my personal website is travis.pflanz.me. My email address is travis AT pflanz.me. I really like this idea for a personal website. I also have travispflanz.com which redirects to travis.pflanz.me, as does pflanz.me (pflanz.com was not available).

While I really like this idea, he did not, and only wanted the .com, so his domain is FirstnameLastname.com.

One of the main reasons I went the route I did is because I couldn't come up with a suitable @travispflanz.com email address, travis AT travispflanz.com just seems odd, as does me AT travispflanz.com.

My question, what are the best personal email addresses to use for personal full-name .com domain names?

Thanks!

Solution

There is no 'best email address'. There are only options, with little to separate them beyond personal preference.

[email protected] and [email protected] are both popular, although generic addresses carry slight disadvantages over named addresses such as [email protected], namely:

• A generic address may attract more spam than an address using a name (because spammers tend to target common catch-all and enquiry addresses like [email protected]). This may not be a problem if your friend has good spam protection, like Gmail's.

• A generic address may be blocked from mailing lists that your friend wants to join (because popular newsletter services like MailChimp reject addresses that sound like they might forward mail to multiple recipients, such as [email protected] and [email protected])

For those reasons, it's probably best to use [email protected] even though it would repeat the name, or [email protected] if you feel uncomfortable with the repetition for some reason.

Comments

[MrWhite]

You're lucky, my "lastname.me" (and every other TLD for that matter) were scooped up by someone else years ago. :( Actually, I could go ".pro", but I'm not sure that conveys the right message!?

[Waleed Hamra]

i really like the idea of [email protected] idea... seeing as i'm in the same boat as OP's friend, thanks!