I have a friend who wants to get away from his @gmail.com email address and on to his brand new domain email. He says it would be “more professional”. I can relate. I have definitely felt the same way in the past. But now I’ve flip flopped my view.
Now I prefer it when someone has an email address that is @gmail.com or @mac.com or @yahoo.com (or another mail service I respect). What that says to me is: “I’d rather use a tried and true email system than re-invent the wheel and run my own mail server.”
When you send someone an email at a weird personally-owned domain, I can’t help but think: where is this mail server? some weird host with reliability problems? what mail client do they use? are they going to actually get it? will I be able to help them find it if it doesn’t show up? is their website speed suffering because it’s so busy running mail processes?
And by the way, I know that you can run GMail off your own domains (I exclusively do this, I don’t run a single mail server of my own), so having your own domain email doesn’t necessarily reveal how you are actually running email. It’s the *perception* I’m concerned with.
And… yes, I’m the first to bitch when GMail goes down. But, I’ll bet you a coke it has better uptime than your own personal mail server.
My setup is kind of a clusterfuck, but I set up Gmail for all my domain email addresses, then forward them all to my main Gmail account, with filters applying labels so I can keep track of it all.
It’s confusing, but I only want to log in to one account.
Whatever works man. I’m kind of a fan of the “one” system. One email for everything. Same with Twitter, one account for everything.
The only time I like seeing a @gmail.com or @yahoo.com is that I know how to reach the person via IM without having to ask or look it up. Generally, I still think its poor form to use @gmail.com for business contact. I think any small or medium business *not* using Google Apps for the domain is crazy. The features are amazing… I recommend it to all my clients.
@tommy: I do the exact same thing. I started this before I had my domains setup on Google Apps, but stuck with it after the switch.
Cool post Chris, I’m in the middle of getting my personal site up and was toying with this very issue on the weekend.
I think I’ll go with Tommy’s setup and forward everything to my existing gmail. I think the perception from your average person might be the opposite to ours and they’ll see it as a bit unprofessional – something akin to having our sites sit on freesites.biz/mydomain.
“I know how to reach the person via IM without having to ask”
That’s a major strike against my system, for me personally. I love getting IM’s from friends and coworkers, but I despise it from random people. No offense to them personally, but I just can’t allow that level of distraction. Email first, please.
I’m probably not alone…but whenever someone gives me an @aol.com address…I have about a 10% confidence rating that they will actually receive/read the message.
For me @aol.com = “I’ll just call them”