Sam Brown

Email Addresses one for all or all for one?

#221 27th November 2007 at 2am 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!

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Comments

qrayg 27 November 2007, 03:16 #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, 04:14 #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, 04:59 #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, 08:39 #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, 01:56 #5

Gears looks interesting, thanks for the link!

Ben Henschel 9 December 2007, 10:27 #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!

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

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