Monday, June 16, 2008

Easily picking email addresses at webmail services

Do you have more than one email account at gmail, yahoo or any other mail web service? Most of us do. For instance, I have one account for my personal stuff and one for joining mailing lists. This is a good idea, since I don't want all the messages from mailing lists to clutter my personal inbox and occupy space in my account.

Occasionally, I open an account for an specific purpose, like a project. If you have tried this, you know that it is difficult to pick a new address that is available. Most of the time, you end up adding numbers to it, or putting funny names. This addresses become quite difficult to remember. So I came with a simple solution, borrowing ideas from the way DNS work.

I consider my email address as a base prefix. Lets suppose that my address in name@somemail.com (this is an address I just made up, by the way, so don't send spam to it...). Now, lets suppose that I want to create an account for my mailing lists as a developer. Then, I will open an account name.developer@somemail.com. Later, if I want another addres for a project, I can create name.projectblah@somemail.com.

Most people don't use dots in their addresses, so it is very unlikely that this addresses are taken. The addresses are also easy to remember as they all share my base address as a prefix.

You can also take the concept a little bit farther and add even further levels for your account name. For instance, for managing bugs in the project, I could create name.projectblah.bugs@somemail.com, but this is probably too much.

This is a simple idea that anyone can apply.

See you next time,

C.A.

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