Sometimes our names are really long, especially if we hyphenate. Sometimes our company names are really long when we tried a bit late in the game to secure a dot com. Sometimes our teams are really small, but we want to appear larger. This is where email aliases come into play. We host our mail with Google, so this is super easy to add. Check with your mail services provider to see how to add aliases to specific accounts.

Aliases also come in handy when you change staff, or someone meets with an untimely death, and you still need to receive their mail without paying for the additional accounts or having to login-logout, or bring in their backlog of emails. That’s a different process I’ll cover in another post. This post is to give you ideas of how to create some solutions for your long names.

I was inspired to write this while working on a 20-page insert for an upcoming conference. We have nearly 200 participants in this insert that filled out a form of how they want to be listed. A few things came up – primarily – long, long email addresses and super long company names that won’t fit in the format. We can reduce the spacing, size, etc. but then it’s pretty much unreadable. Defeats the purpose of the insert.

Example: Elizabeth.Fellows@PlatinumRealEstateProfessionals.com – WOW! If Beth set up a few aliases, or at least one, it would help a bunch.

EFellows@prep.realty – way shorter.

When you secure your domains, think about the mail – a shorter version. The domain can forward to the LONG name (because people will use your email address to figure out your website URL – it needs to resolve to your main site). Consider getting both the full name and something shorter with a different “ending.” .now, .today,  (you can see the options and prices here – but don’t buy it from them. Buy it from Godaddy or Cloudflare.) Find something that fits you and get a SHORT version – think what will fit on a HAT. You can add it to your DOMAINS in Google, or wherever, and then you can have that short domain for your EMAIL alias.

Let’s talk about aliases or alternate emails. These get added under each user in the Google admin interface. Each provider will have different places. These are not listServes; this is truly an alternative email that will still go to the main account. Aliases allow you to reply from that account in your inbox, as well. For example, if someone emails booking@susanfinch.com to invite me to be on a podcast, I can reply as “my booking agent” and give a response. If I’m really tricky, I can speak in the third person to give the impression my team is much larger. When we receive emails to our alias accounts, it isn’t always obvious that’s what it was sent to unless you add filters to tag it as going to that alias account. Otherwise, it just ends up in your inbox, and you’ll have to look at the “to” details to see where it was set to so you can reply appropriately.

Once the additional domains are in the SAME admin account, you can create aliases that use any of those domains. You cannot have a user for an account and an alias for the same email address.

If you need to terminate an employee, you can transfer all of their mail, calendar, and files to another account – perhaps yours. THEN, you can delete their full user account and create an alias account so you don’t miss any communication that may still be happening with the former employee.

You can also set your mail up to always reply from the account it was sent to, and add unique signatures for each alias account. Once you have this setup, you don’t have to do anything else.

If you need help with this or planning your strategy, let me know.