I took Jason Kolb’s advice and purchased the domain for my name. As many of you know, I have recently been migrating much of my web presence over to the domain: www.timothypost.com
I moved my blog there last week (there’s still 46 of you guys out there subscribing to the old Flying Seeds feed. Please click the RSS icon in the right-hand sidebar and subscribe to the new one). Yesterday, I signed-up for Google Apps for Your Domain (GAFYD) for the domain timothypost.com (I’ve been using it for months for my small business www.zenathletica.com) and have begun the long process of my updating my new email with the couple hundred accounts (literally) I’ve created online over the past 13 years (I still get email to my old AOL email even thought I haven’t used it for at least 5 years).
There is one very cool benefit to having your email hosted at your own domain. It’s called a catch-all address.
Google explains that, “…… a catch-all address will allow you to receive any email sent to your domain that doesn’t match an existing alias.”
Wikipedia says, “A catch-all for email, usually refers to a mailbox (prefix) on a domain that will “catch all” of the email addressed to it, so any email address at the domain that doesn’t belong to another mailbox will end up in this default mailbox.”
Why is a catch-all address interesting? Very simply, it allows you to create custom email addresses for every single time you are asked to give an email which allows you to track how that company uses your email and with whom it shares your email. How?
Here’s what happens. Let’s say I go to the Business Week website and I create an account. When they ask for my email I enter the following “businessweek@timothypost.com.” Huh? Yup, I enter the name of the company to whom I am giving my email as the prefix of that email address.
Remember, a catch-all email address will take any and all emails sent to the domain @timothypost.com with prefixes which DO NOT match any prefixes used and forward them to any prefix (email box) I choose. In this case, my main email prefix is email@timothypost.com. So, that email address I entered at business week (businessweek@timothypost.com) will be automatically forwarded to my main box email@timothypost.com.
Tonight I updated my Capital One credit card online account with the new email of capitalone@timothypost.com. I gave my high school the email exeter@timothypost.com. In fact, every time I need to enter an email for some company or service I will enter a custom email address. As far as I know (and please tell me if I am wrong) there is NO LIMIT to the number of custom aliases you can create.
There’s a number of very cool benefits from using the catch-all option in this way. First, you limit dramatically the number of people who know your “master” email address. Instead, they get an alias.
Secondly, if the company whom you gave that customized alias email address decides to make some money by selling your email address to a mass mailing company or more likely to an affiliated sister company (think Vogue and Wired magazines both owned by Conde Nast) then you will know immediately. Remember, if Vogue sends you an email offer addressed to wired@timothypost.com it’s a pretty big red flag.
Thirdly, Gmail (which is the email program Google Apps for Your Domain uses) allows you to redirect incoming emails through keyword filters to a spam folder or just the trash folder. In other words, if one of your custom aliases starts getting sold and resold to pain-in-the-neck spammers you can “turn-off” that particular email prefix and your master address is safe.
Please let me know if there are any other benefits which I am unaware.
Question for you. What is the “ideal” prefix when one to use when you use your name as your email domain. For example, should I make my email address timpost@timothypost.com or tgp@timothypost.com or something else? I have chosen email@timothypost.com (unless I am convinced otherwise). I had wanted to do emailme@timothypost.com or sendmeanemail@timothypost.com but my wife convinced me, correctly I think, that these variants were too complicated.
