Professional Tip.

[Boydean]

Originally Posted by keehun

Team 2502 assigns every one of their students/mentors with a first.last@team2502.com

Captains who set it up bypassed last name.

We also use that email address and password as a backend for an OpenID service where we use it to authenticate our forums. With that, we have email and forum working in same authentication table.

Thanks to Google Apps free edition.

Our team does the same. Staple members (team captain, mentors, PR group) has team email addresses that go on their business cards. We also took it a step further and setup a Google Voice account for the coach. This enables a easy transfer of 'power and communications' to another person in the time of crisis (that is if you look beyond the fact Google Voice number is free, therefore might disappear at any moment).

[Andrew Schreiber]

Emails, I have 3 of them, one forwards to the other the other is my work email that I am not allowed to forward. Schr4261@Some.University is my university email address, schreiaj@server is my personal address and Aschreiber@company is my work address. I personally like my schreiaj one, short and simple.

Along these lines please be careful what you post on FB or anywhere else on the internet. A determined person can find a lot of personal information using some carefully crafted searches. For example, I was trying to find a friend of mine's address (I had to pick them up but they had forgotten to give me their address) I knew the approximate area (zip code) and a name. These two pieces of information and 1 Google search gave me their address. Searching a name and a town will give you a lot of hits too. Heck, a search for my name returns a picture I didn't even know was taken as well as several news articles. Anyway, point being, be careful. I spent about 5 minutes and managed to find a pretty comprehensive list of my skills as well as about every scholarship I won to go to school (and my old cell phone number).

[Chris is me]

Originally Posted by Andrew Schreiber

Along these lines please be careful what you post on FB or anywhere else on the internet. A determined person can find a lot of personal information using some carefully crafted searches. For example, I was trying to find a friend of mine's address (I had to pick them up but they had forgotten to give me their address) I knew the approximate area (zip code) and a name. These two pieces of information and 1 Google search gave me their address. Searching a name and a town will give you a lot of hits too. Heck, a search for my name returns a picture I didn't even know was taken as well as several news articles. Anyway, point being, be careful. I spent about 5 minutes and managed to find a pretty comprehensive list of my skills as well as about every scholarship I won to go to school (and my old cell phone number).

Keep in mind that, in general, when you hit "submit" on any web site, it's findable forever. So don't go posting pictures of that wild party or whatever event you're at with the idea that you can delete them later and no one will ever know. You never know what will bite you in the butt later.

For example, there's a note on my Facebook account that pretty viciously attacks a school I attended. The note is the reason that I used the past tense, despite being intentionally hidden.

That being said, this xkcd expresses my thoughts on the matter rather well. (Contains strong language) I generally don't like having to pretend I'm something I'm not just because some judgmental jerk will think, "When he was 14 years old, he didn't like his high school! How can we hire him 20 years later?". Especially because I consider myself a mostly responsible person and generally don't do stupid things. I guess that's the way things are, though, so I'll watch what I say.

[JohnBoucher]

Purchasing your own domain is very cheap. There are some plans that offer just email hosting. Do that and route you emails through that domain name. This gives you unlimited control and looks very professional.

A secondary issue that many fail on is the subject line of an email. I get lots of email and I decide what to read based on the subject and sender. subject line that does not address the issue of the email will get trashed.