What to put before the @
April 3rd, 2008
I recently switched things around at work in regards to our email system. I was originally receiving all our work emails on my powerbook as well as all my personal and work related emails. which meant i always seemed to have a large amount of emails in my inbox, so i moved all the emails to do with the day job to a computer at work which has dramatically freed up my emails on my laptop. This also meant that i had to set up a new email address for my freelance work contacts – i was always using my work email for this.
so the problem now was what to put before the @martinlucas.co.uk for an email address. the obvious is my name, i.e. martin@martinlucas.co.uk which a lot of people do, but it’s something that i don’t like because of the repetition and i didn’t want the boring and predictable;
info@
contact@
mail@
email@
so i had a look around at work other ‘cool’ companies out there had. i know that i had seen websites with something different before the @ before – but purposefully looking for those wasn’t easy.
one of the more popular things to put before the @ was a greeting of some sorts, hello@ was found at a number of sites and i think this works really well – it’s casual, inviting and drops the rather stuffy and tired info@. but it still wasn’t quite right for me, as i wanted the email address to be (at least almost) grammatically correct, so you could actually say out the email address and it would make sense.
this limits the choices somewhat to verbs that came be done at a person or a place. here’s a couple that i came up with;
wink@ – way too flirtacious, but pretty fun
shout@ – would be great if it was for my dj site
sayhello@ – what i ended up going for
so i went with ‘say hello at martin lucas dot co dot uk’, i think it works quite well. it asks people to contact me at my domain name, it’s an email address and a direction – it’s also quite casual without being too familiar and possibly off putting to potential clients and customers.
Tags: address, at, domain name, email