Can I use my Personal E-mail Address?

Allowing employees to use their personal e-mail addresses for business purposes can have severe consequences.

You are the owner of a business, and you want all of your employees to have a professional e-mail address “xyz@yourcompany.com.” But configuring a mailbox set up for each person seems to be a hassle. The easy solution is to set up the company address but then forward all messages to the employee’s personal account that they have set up already anyway. Problem solved, so you think.

Think Again

Problem # 1:

Let’s assume the personal e-mail address of our sample employee is honeybunny@aol.com. With a forwarder set up, any message that is sent to xyz@yourcompany.com goes directly to honeybunny@aol.com. The employee reads the message on his AOL account and replies to the message as honeybunny@aol.com. NOW, the customer wrote a message to xyz@yourcompany.com. Will she open a message from honeybunny@aol.com? How professional does that address look? Besides, all responses and follow-up e-mails will go directly to honeybunny@aol.com.

Problem # 2:

Let’s say the employee with the address xyz@yourcompany.com becomes sick for an extended period of time (or you go separate ways). You will not have access to the history of the business communications. YOUR customers will have honeybunny@aol.com in their address book and will continue writing to that address. You have no way of knowing what is going on, if e-mails are responded to or let YOUR customers know that XYZ is temporarily unavailable or that a new person is taking over that job. How much business will you lose?

Cutting corners usually bites you later. Therefore, set your employees up with a mailbox that reflects your business domain and separates business from personal e-mails. As a business owner, you need to stay in control. You just have to.

Final Thought:

But what about myself, the business owner? Can I use my personal e-mail address for business? No….just no. While problem #2 may not be an issue, problem #1 still applies. Secondly, what if you change your e-mail provider? Move away from Hotmail to Gmail?  Your customers will still have your old e-mail address stored and you may miss out on important messages.