Why would a sole trader or small business need two email addresses? Simple. If you have a website you will want an email address on it so people can contact you. Problem is that as soon as you publish an email address on the web, spammers including people and software robots will pick up that email address and send you spam. It could be simple business introductions, it could be gobbledygook, it could be dubious offshore companies offering their services or worse. Eitherway, spam is annoying.
By setting up a generic email just for your website such as info@, sales@, bookings@ etc you can keep these emails somewhat separate from your normal inbox (depending on how you set up your email software). This means you won’t be bombarded with the spam, you can simply check this web email address’ inbox once a day, trash the spam all at once and respond to your enquiries. Also, if the spam ever becomes too much to bear, you can change the web email address without needing to tell all your personal contacts, customers, family etc (because they will be using your primary email which is explained below).
Your other email address should be your primary one and should be printed on your business card. Commonly this is your name such as john@ or j.doe@ but it can be anything you like. By not publishing it on the web, you will receive a lot less spam because you are using it with your real world contacts. Whether they are suppliers or customers and prospects or family and friends, all of these people are unlikely to spam you.
TIP: When you respond to genuine enquiries that come in through your web email address (e.g., info@), remember to reply using your primary email address (e.g., john@). That way their reply to you will come into your primary inbox.
At Blue Platypus we won’t charge you to set up another email address or two, so if you want to change the way you handle email, just drop us a line.
