It’s sometimes to fun to try to figure out what leads people to choose an email address.
Every time I place an order with a company I’ve never used before, or sign up for a new online service, I use a new unique address that is automatically forwarded to my inbox so that if I’m spammed I can immediately tell who sold the spammer that address. Many of today’s email services recognize this problem and will allow you to create such a “masked” email address easily (Apple’s service is called “Hide My Email”).
But most people don’t want their main email address to be obscure, and a commercial enterprise, in particular, needs an email address that reflects its identity.
If you’re an individual with a common name using a “free” email service (like outlook.com or yahoo.com), you’re going to have trouble using your name as your email address, which is why there are so many addresses like johnsmith395688 out there.
(Let me explain the use of the quotes around “free”. There’s a saying among privacy experts that if the product is free, then the product is you. Anytime you sign up for something that’s “free”, the provider is collecting information about you. If you want privacy, pay for it.)
If you’re in business, to my mind there is no excuse for using a “free” service like outlook.com for your email. Paid email services are cheap for what they provide, and they make it easy to have a professional-looking address like “info@joescleaners.biz” (which, by the way, is really available right now if you want it).
Which brings us to today’s topic. Take a look at the the carton in the photo. This carton contained the whiteboard I just bought. Try to make sense of the email address on it. Try to *remember* the email address after looking away, and bear in mind that email addresses are completely unforgiving. Make an error in one character, and the email system responds to your message with “huh?”
What the heck is “maxgearuservice”? Is it “maxgear user service” mashed together so hard that the two occurrences of “ser” got squished into one? Is it “maxgear us [i.e. “U.S.”] service” mashed together with the “ss” squished into “s”? Or is it what it most easily separates into, “max gear user vice”? Do they really have a department devoted to user vice?
Interestingly, this email address doesn’t appear on the company’s website. The address you find on their “support” page is maxgear2022@gmail.com — another obscure address at another “free” service. (Why “2022”? The “about” page implies that they’ve been in business since 2010.) But maybe that’s the point. If you can’t remember or find their email address, or find it hard to type into the “To:” box, you’re less likely to ask them for the customer service they would probably prefer not to provide.
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