February 27th, 2011, 10 Comments »
The other day I had a meeting with a professional person, a freelancer who worked in an industry tangentially connected to the Web. We organized the meeting via email, and I noticed with dismay that he had a Compuserve email address, as in Wayne.Gretzky@compuserve.com. This an old-school American internet service provider–a Canadian equivalent might be Shaw or Uniserve.
I’m a little ashamed to admit that I’m an email snob. When I get an email from a self-employed professional and it comes from Gmail, Hotmail and the like, and not their own domain, I get a little judgey.
It suggests to me, in a small way, that the person isn’t really serious about marketing their own business.
I asked around amongst my web-savvy friends, and they all confessed to a similar bias. Call it snobbery, call it elitist–there’s at least a hint of the business card scene from American Psycho here–but it seems to be a widely-held opinion, at least among webophiles.
On occasion, I give talks at universities and colleges, and participate in informational interviews. One of the pieces of advice I give to all students, wherever they intend to work, is to establish some kind of web presence for themselves. You are, after all, what the Internet says you are, so it’s best to own a piece of that presence. I just read Gina Trapani’s post about the importance of a ‘nameplate site’.
Differentiate yourself from the pack
So why don’t freelancers get their own domain for their email accounts?
- They don’t consider having a generic email address an issue.
- They’re aware of this perception, and they don’t care.
- They don’t know how cheap and easy it is to set up your own email (and web) domain.
If you wish to be self-employed and work full-time (as opposed to a hobbyist or part-time position) in 2011, you need a simple website and a branded email address. Not only does it look to us web snobs that you’re serious about what you’re doing, but it will also differentiate you from a bunch of freelancers who haven’t taken these steps.
I randomly happened upon Victoria Bushnell’s website. She’s apparently a freelance writer and editor, and she’s got a simple, good-looking website. There’s nothing particularly remarkable about it, and it doesn’t have to be updated often, but it certainly exudes professionalism.
The retort to my advice is usually “but I get lots of work with no website and my plain old Gmail account”. That’s all well and good–I forget to bring business cards to events sometimes, and I still may get work out of them. However, are you getting the best possible work you could? If not, then there’s room for improvement, and a branded email address and simple website seems like low-hanging fruit.
Three steps and you’re done
So, how do you get started?
- Register your preferred domain. I use NameCheap. Pick something simple, like your full name, or your company name.
- Set up your email using Google Apps for Domains, which enables you to use Gmail with @yourdomain.com. Here are detailed instructions on how to do that.
- Create a simple website. I’d recommend using WordPress.com, and then connecting your domain with your new site. In fact, you may just wish to start with WordPress.com by registering your domain there.
10 Comments »
January 10th, 2011, 3 Comments »
It’s a very difficult–possibly impossible–question to answer, but it’s a fun thought experiment. Putting aside automated and spam messages, what person’s email address receives the most unique email messages?
I was discussing the possibilities with a couple of people. Suggestions included President Obama, Bill Gates, Donald Trump or the business editor at The New York Times. Other, less plausible candidates included Santa Claus and Jesus. Who else?
Here’s one unscientific data point to consider:
That’s for Google.com. For the sake of comparison, here’s Google.co.uk:
Sky is a broadcaster in the UK, vaguely equivalent in reach (and maybe in politics and intellectual rigour?) to Fox News.
Who do you think receives the most email?
3 Comments »
December 15th, 2009, 2 Comments »
Project Honey Pot is a side project by Unspam Technologies, and “gathers statistics on Internet robots and the spammers who sometimes use them to steal email addresses”. As I understand it, they work with website publishers to serve up fake, unique email addresses on web pages. Spammers’ bots discover these email addresses and start directing spam email at them. When they do, the project gathers information about when and from where the spam originated.
Apparently they then “work with law enforcement authorities to track down and prosecute spammers”. If they do, they ought to put some success stories on their website. I see value in the data collection, but I’d see more value in fewer spammers in the wild.
In any case, they just tracked their billionth spam message:
The message…was a United States Internal Revenue Service (IRS) phishing scam. The spam email was sent by a bot running on a compromised machine in India (122.167.68.1). The spamtrap address to which the message was sent was originally harvested on November 4, 2007 by a particularly nasty harvester (74.53.249.34) that is responsible for 53,022,293 other spam messages that have been received by Project Honey Pot.
They’ve published a bunch of statistics about the data they collect. A few highlights:
- Monday is the busiest day of the week for email spam, while Saturday is the quietest.
- Malicious bots have increased at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 378% since Project Honey Pot started.
- It takes the average spammer 2 and a half weeks from when they first harvest your email address to when they send you your first spam message, but that’s twice as fast as they were five years ago.
I’ve said this before, but, thanks to Gmail, my email spam problem has nearly disappeared in the past couple of years.
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November 4th, 2008, 3 Comments »
Julie emailed one of our clients with some questions yesterday, and got this response:
Hey Julie,
My wife (and soon to be born child) is just getting started with her “birth process” so I will not be able to look at this stuff for a few days :)
Heh. I gather that birth process can take a while, so the father might as well be answering email in the meantime, eh?
3 Comments »
July 25th, 2008, 5 Comments »
Julie and I work together on most Capulet projects. As a result, we both get CC’d on a lot of email. In 80% of cases, only one of us actually replies and participates in a given email thread. In many of those cases, the discussion is mostly or entirely irrelevant to whoever doesn’t respond. If they need to know about it, the responder can generally be convey the thread’s gist in a very brief conversation.
It isn’t news to anyone that CC gets abused all the time. In truth, though, when Julie and I both receive email, it’s usually not CC abuse. The sender is just unsure which of us will respond. And I think we like it that way, because we don’t necessarily want to surgically divide our duties and responsibilities.
Wouldn’t it be great, though, if my email app included a button that read “Julie can ignore this message”? Having replied to a message (and maybe its followups), it takes much less attention for me to assess whether she needs to read the thread than it does for her to make that appraisal by having to read the whole thing.
Wouldn’t it be great if we assigned a few trusted colleagues this power? They’d just right-click on our names and choose “Ignore this thread” from a drop-down menu. The message would bypass our inbox and get archived wherever we specified.
Maybe this functionality already exists in some email applications? If so, when can we get it in Gmail?
5 Comments »
October 31st, 2007, 4 Comments »
About a year ago, I switched both my personal and email accounts over to Gmail for Domains. For the uninitiated, this means that we use the Gmail inteeface, but can retain our @darrenbarefoot.com and @capulet.com address.
Things were bumpy for the first couple of months, but since then it’s been awesome. There are plenty of advantages–great search, no backup anxiety, email access anywhere, a decent and improving web interface, IMAP support (though I don’t use it, it’s nice to know it’s there). However, the biggest change is a fairly subtle one–the grouping of email threads together into conversations. It makes my email usage way more efficient.
Lately I’ve combined Gmail with Mailplane (thanks to Tara for the recommendation), which is kind of an application shell for Gmail. It doesn’t provide a ton of stuff I desperately want, but it does get my email client out of the browser. That, combined with the drag-and-drop attachment functionality, makes it worth the US $25 I paid for a ‘family’ license.
I was reminded to write in praise of Gmail because I spotted this Gmail marketing piece via Digg. It indicates that 70% of the email to Gmail accounts is spam, yet their spam-blocking is so effective that less than 1% gets through.
I believe those numbers. I’ve had my darrenbarefoot.com account public for six or seven years, and I maybe receive one to two spam messages in my inbox.
That’s a fantastic improvement over a few years ago. My email spam problem is pretty much solved.
For now.
4 Comments »
July 12th, 2007, 5 Comments »
We’ve all had this experience: you send an email message to an organization, and you never hear back from them. It’s a story as old as the Web. Why don’t organizations respond? They typically cite excuses like resourcing, workflow and so forth.
It’s 2007, and every organization on the planet understands the limitations of email. Yet, many still publish an email address as the exclusive means of contacting them online. The most recent culprits I’ve found are BC’s property tax office and British Jet (a nightmarish organization for the customer service, incidentally).
A web form is a slight improvement, but most of these exist solely to make life easier for the organization–they reduce spam. On the back end, form queries usually just get sent by email, so the result is the same.
There is a better way. It’s simple, proven and cheap. Most of all, it makes life easier for organizations and customers, and it demonstrates a commitment to service.
I’m speaking here of the lowly support ticket system. You submit a query via a web form, and you get assigned a virtual ‘support ticket’, a number which enables you to track your conversation with the company. In my experience, even the automated response is a huge reassurance. I suddenly have confidence that my issue’s in the support queue, and that it will be answered. And it usually is.
The organization gets more efficient, and can do useful things like add answers to the public knowledge base, reducing the number of future inquiries on the same topic.
World of Warcraft Europe has one. I’m sure they receive thousands of queries a day, but I got my obscure question answer in 48 hours.
There’s a zillion such systems out there, and they’re super cheap or free. They’re certainly not a panacea, but they will make your support staff more efficient. In my anecdotal experience, I’ve received far more reliable support from companies with support ticket systems than your bog-standard email address.
More importantly, they show that you actually care what your customers think. An email address, on the other hand, sends a very clear message: “bugger off, we can’t be arsed.”
I was looking for an appropriate photo to accompany this post, and happened upon this awesome one. “Help me, Obiwan, you’re my only hope!”
5 Comments »
June 10th, 2007, 5 Comments »
Thanks to this site (and despite the cheeky disclaimer on the Contact page), I probably get three to five unsolicited email questions from strangers a week. A few years ago, I used to ignore 60% of these emails.
Over time, I’ve observed how people I admire like Tim Bray and Seth Godin work hard to answer each email they receive. And they probably get ten or fifty times the email I do, so now I endeavour (though I don’t always succeed) to do the same.
To take a slight diversion, Derek pointed to this article about professionals getting constantly solicited for free advice:
Las Vegas poker champion Scott Fischman, who writes about online poker, says that when he’s invited to social gatherings, he has to decide: “Do I want to spend four hours answering questions [about card-playing] or should I just stay home?” If he does venture out, he strives to remain helpful, briefly explaining how winning at poker comes from “learning how to learn” the game.
Most of the questions that I receive can be answered by some judicious Google searching, so I often send people links to Google results pages. You know, teach a man to fish and all that.
But here’s the thing: at least half the people to whom I reply never respond to say thank you. I hate to sound like some fuddy-duddy, but a little courtesy goes a long way, especially in the anonymous, nearly context-free world of the Web.
Some subset of questions probably thinks its more courteous to choose not to send an otherwise meaningless thank-you email, but I don’t. I’d rather hear whether I’d helped them, and tkae the extra seven seconds to read and delete that email.
Don’t believe me? Go ask Curtis E. Bear.
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