Sam Brown

Email Addresses one for all or all for one?

#221 27th November 2007 at 5am Article 6 Comments

Being a web designer and developer I have a myriad of different websites that I run and update, multiple sites equals multiple domains and thus multiple email addresses. Am I managing things right? Is having an email address per domain a good idea? How do you handle this type of situation? Let me explain my situation a little further…

A quick note, all of my email addresses are my first name at domain name, I would rather not link them all here so I have only provided links to the domains.

How many email addresses do you have?

I started out with two email addresses one for work (@massiveblue.com) and one for personal emails (@brown.tc) but through work has come a handful of new domains and with each domain comes a new email address.

The reason I have an email address for each domain is that I feel it important to stay on brand, if someone is filling in the contact form for support at thesidepath.com I think it is important the response comes from an @thesidepath.com email address and not my main work email.

My email addresses, no joke

Below is an incomplete list of domains that I have an email addresses at, I kid you not. sam at:

  • massiveblue.com
  • massiveblue.net
  • brown.tc
  • welovetxp.com
  • adverticonising.com
  • poshcss.com
  • favelets.co.uk
  • arrivingat.com
  • pepperminttea.co.uk
  • southparkx.net
  • smoovenet.com
  • thesidepath.com
  • and I have a gmail account too!

How do I manage it all?

To be perfectly honest, managing all of these email addresses isn’t much of an issue. I use Thunderbird as my email client and I have 2 POP accounts within it; one for my work and one for my personal emails. All of the different addresses listed above (aside from my personal domain) all arrive in my work inbox.

Composing a new email automatically sets my outgoing email address as massiveblue.com and if I hit reply to an email from say welovetxp.com Thunderbird automagically selects the corresponding email address as my outgoing, it all works like a treat.

Am I alone?

Does anyone else have a similar situation? Even on a smaller scale? I would love to hear from someone.. or anyone that is in a similar situation and has any kind words of advise or encouragement!

Post a link to this on Twitter ↩

Comments

qrayg 27 November 2007, 06:16 #1

I don’t have nearly as many domains as you do, but I have a very similar setup. I used to use Thunderbird but I switched to Gmail back in 2005. Gmail does the auto-reply-to email address thing too so I never have to think about which email address I need to reply as. Plus I can check my email from my PSP, PS3, Phone, or any internet enabled device on the planet.

Dennis 27 November 2007, 07:14 #2

You have me beat on the email addresses. Mail.app seems to work fine for me but I do have to manually change the from field. I have never tackled Thunderbird but it looks nice although my email account is on gmail so I would be interested in how the commenter above is pushing multiple addresses to Gmail. Any way good post.

Sam Brown 27 November 2007, 07:59 #3

I use Gmail for one of my accounts (which gets a lot of spam) but I simply could not work without having constant access to my email, including in an offline environment.

I do use IMAP on my iPhone to check my email when I am out and about though, but webmail really doesn’t suit me.

qrayg 27 November 2007, 11:39 #4

@Dennis
In the account settings you can add multiple email addresses for any domain that you own.

Through my domains host I forward all of my email addresses to a single alias that points to my gmail email address.

@Sam
I guess that’s what Gears is for :)

Sam Brown 28 November 2007, 04:56 #5

Gears looks interesting, thanks for the link!

Ben Henschel 9 December 2007, 13:27 #6

I have several email addresses as well (not as many as you) I found that the best way is to use Gmail for your domain. It gives you the gmail interface but with your domain name instead of the @gmail.com You can have multiple accounts and use filters to filter emails to different labels. So I have all my email come into one place but most of it skips the inbox and goes into a label (like personal, and other various projects). I found that having all your email come to one place is the best way to go. Hope that helps!

Commenting has closed for this article. Feel free to me.

Sam Brown co-founded Iterate, and was previously VP of Design at Foursquare. Based in NYC.

– Dribbble • Endorse • Facebook • Foursquare • Instagram • Twitter