Business Email Naming Conventions: firstname@ vs hello@
How to structure addresses as you grow from solo founder to fifteen-person team.
Bad names create confusion; good names scale. Here is a simple convention that works from day one to your first hires.
Quick summary
- firstname@ — friendly and short; works until you hire a second person with the same first name
- firstname.lastname@ — unambiguous and scales to any team size
- first initial + lastname@ (jsmith@) — compact, common in larger organisations
- Whatever you choose, use it for everyone, so people can guess a colleague’s address correctly
- Nicknames and in-jokes that will look odd to a new client
Pick one format for people and stick to it
- firstname@ — friendly and short; works until you hire a second person with the same first name
- firstname.lastname@ — unambiguous and scales to any team size
- first initial + lastname@ (jsmith@) — compact, common in larger organisations
- Whatever you choose, use it for everyone, so people can guess a colleague’s address correctly
Role addresses for functions, not people
Role addresses such as hello@, support@, billing@ and jobs@ describe what the mailbox is for. They stay the same when the person answering them changes, which is why they belong on your website, invoices and packaging. Personal addresses are for ongoing relationships with a named contact.
Names to avoid
- Nicknames and in-jokes that will look odd to a new client
- Numbers (sales2@) that suggest there is a sales1 nobody reads
- Hyphens and underscores that people mishear on the phone
- Different formats for founders and staff — it makes the team look inconsistent
Plan for fifteen people
On OquMail’s free plan you can create up to 15 mailboxes on your domain. A common split for a small team is one named mailbox per person plus three or four role mailboxes, such as hello@, support@ and billing@. Need more than 15? Contact us — $1 per extra mailbox per month.