When going online you need to have accounts to use services, have a blog, contribute on forums and other things, I call this having an Online Social Identity. We might have one or more of these depending on our lifestyle or employment. The Online Social Identities will always start with the big three on the internet Google, Microsoft and Yahoo because they run many of the services you will use and so you will need an account with them.
The aim of this series of articles is to streamline your online social presence by unifying all of your accounts allowing you to get on with being online instead of trying to figure out what to do, what accounts you need and why.
Social Email Providers
When setting up your email addresses you will need to get one from each of the following email providers. These are special case because the companies that supply them use these as accounts for their services on the internet and between them they control a lot of the services you will use on the internet.
If you already have accounts that you use from these providers you can still use them, it is not against the rules.
- Google / @gmail.com
- Microsoft / @outlook.com
- Yahoo / @yahoo.com
NB: Apart from Microsoft you cannot change the associated email address for these accounts once they have been created.
The account email determines certain aspects of services you sign up for i.e. Your Microsoft email address will become your Skype username and your Yahoo! Email address becomes your Flickr name. However some services such as Microsoft Xbox will allow you to set a different GamerTag if you want. It is for this reason you should configure these accounts first because they will become a permanent part of your Social Online Presence.
When you create theses emails you should make sure they all have the same Local-part (in this example ‘test123’):
This makes things a lot easier to manage going forward and gives you scope to swap between which account you use for your primary email a lot easier.
Different Online Social Identities
People have different roles in life and usually want these to be kept separate and this is no different online. Each aspect of your online presence will need its own identity and therefore will need a set of email accounts as outlined above. The possible groups are:
- Personal
- Website/Blog/Software
- Business/Company/Infrastructure
I will now go into more depth about the different identities and how you should use them. You might not need all of these identities.
Personal
This identity is for an individual personal which is separate to all other things and just represents one person.
- This represents you.
- If you have personal blog or family images you would use this profile because they all belong to you.
- Consider your Xbox account; imagine you leave a company you want to take all of your personal stuff with you including your Xbox account. If this is tied to your work’s or business account you would not be able to take it with you but because it is your personal account which is not tied to work in anyway this is not problem.
- If you have multiple blogs you post on you will not have multiple logins for each of them.
Email Use Examples
- Google
- Personal mobile phone (Android)
- Google+ profile
- Google Play Store
- Microsoft
- Xbox Live
- Personal mobile phone (Windows Phone)
- Windows 10 login
- Yahoo
- Personal Flickr account
Website / Blog / Software
This identity is only needed if you have a Website, Blog or Software that is large enough to warrant its own emails and other stuff.
- This will be your online public facing presence.
- This is how people will see you and your brand.
- Acquiring the email address similar to your blog name prevents anyone from pretending to be you or someone from your Website/Blog/Software.
Email Use Examples
- Google
- Google+ page
- Outlook
- Skype
- Yahoo
- Flickr account
- Flickr account
Business / Company / Infrastructure
I will use these accounts for anything to do with my business and mass management of my websites, in particular Webmaster Tools, Analytics and Advertising.
Depending on your circumstances you definitely want separate business accounts. Imagine if your business collapsed or you sold it and you have all your personal stuff in this identity you would most likely have to start again because data migration is not the best or just not possible or even if you just needed a member of staff to perform certain tasks he might be able to read your personal emails and see other personal information.
- All companies need their own identity that just belongs to that company
- This account can be used for many websites because your company can own more than one website.
- This account should not be tied to a specific website unless that website is you company name i.e. therockgroup.com – but you may own the matching website if it makes sense.
- This account should be used to configure Analytics, reCAPTCHA, Webmaster Tools and all other infrastructure services for websites.
- Even if you are a one man band you should still separate your work stuff from your personal because one day you might stop working or sell your business etc... This allows things to be kept really neat. If you have multiple websites you can add all of the infrastructure stuff in here or even delegate to someone else without giving the keys to your personal online presence.
Email Use Examples
- Google
- Business mobile phone (Android)
- AdWords (google only allows you 1 account for AdWords; it is against T&Cs to have more than 1. You also need to get approval, set up credit cards and bank details).
- Google Analytics for all of my websites
- Google Webmaster Tools for all of my websites
- Google+ page
- Outlook
- Skype
- Bing Webmaster for all of my websites
- Business mobile phone (Windows Phone)
- Bing advertising account
- Yahoo
- Flicker account in the future - i.e. Pictures of the various buildings we own
- Yahoo advertising account (if they split from Microsoft)
Creating your 'Email Addresses'/Accounts
- First of all select the identities you require. (Personal/Website/Infrastructure)
- Come up with some suitable usernames/email addresses? eg buzzaldrin@ shoppingnut@ test123@. these username should be no longer than 15 characters because this is the longest username Twitter will allow and is probably an industry standard.
- Username Generators | QuantumWarp - These tools will allow you to generate usernames for you to choose from
- Username Checkers | QuantumWarp - These checkers will allow you to see if your selected username has been used on the various Social Media and other sites.
For each identity you require you need to create a group of email addresses from Google, Microsoft and Yahoo all with the same Local-part (in this example ‘test123’):
NB: check the username is available on all 3 suppliers before you commit.
When creating the email address follow these simple guidelines:
- Common
- Configure recovery information (Mobile Phone and Email)
- Enable Two Factor Authentication (optional)
- Configure your profile including adding a logo or image
- Configure your privacy options
- Forward your emails as required (see next section)
- Always pick the .com version for your email. Do not pick a regional version such as .co.uk
- Never use your real name in your email for security reasons (optional)
- Personal
- Pick a sensible name that you would not be ashamed to give an employer in the future and is not overcomplicated.
- Website / Blog / Software
- The Local-part of the emails should have you Website/Blog/Software name in it otherwise this identity would be a little pointless, especially for brand awareness.
- Business / Company / Infrastructure
- Because this identity will hold more than 1 website or company asset you should make sure that you do not use a specific name so you can encompass multiple assets.
- E.g. therockgroup@outlook.com does not specify any particular asset or website that you might own, almost like a holding company but for online assets.
- I would also purchase the domain therockgroup.com (optional)
Managing those new email accounts
For each identity we now have 3 email addresses and to login into them regularly would add an extra burden on to someone who probably has better things to do so we will now explore the various options to reduce the man-hours required.
- Use each account separately
- Forward all emails to one address
- Connected accounts
- Forward to a non-social email account
With any of the options above you will still need to pick a primary email address which is the one you will give out and is easiest for you to use. Some prefer their Google account because it is on their android phone whereas other people prefer Microsoft because their accounts can be used as Exchange accounts within Outlook on their Desktop PC as well as being accessed online giving them the best of both worlds especially if they are a power user.
I will now briefly go over the various options and what I thing about them.
Use each account separately
If you really must, you can just ignore this section except for selecting a primary email address to use.
Forward all emails to one address
Within each of the 3 email providers you can set an option to forward your emails to a specified email address. The advantage of this is you can forward the emails from the 2 accounts you don’t really use the email address on to your primary email allowing you always see email from all 3 accounts in the one place. However when you reply to these emails it will use your primary email address which is ok.
There are different forwarding options but I would always choose to forward and delete emails. This stops there being 2 copies of emails. Yahoo does not allow the deletion of emails when forwarding so in this case I would select ‘Forward email and mark as read’ and then every now and again you can going in and delete them manually.
Connected Accounts
I have not really used this feature but again it is available in all 3 platforms and allows you to manage all of your email accounts in the one platform.
If you use outlook.com as your primary account and connect you Gmail account into it you can send and receive Gmail emails from outlook.com but these emails will be sent form Gmail and stored in Gmail. You have only added a portal to them by connecting your accounts. You still have to curate multiple accounts and I would not recommend this.
When you add your Yahoo Mail, Gmail, or other email accounts to Outlook.com, you can send and read email messages from those accounts without switching between email apps. Each email account you add to Outlook is called a connected account.
Read the article Add your other email accounts to Outlook.com - Office.com it explains what a connected account is and how to set it up for outlook.com addresses.
Forward to a non-social email account
If you already have a normal email address you use such as test123@example.co.uk that you have used for years you could always forward all emails to that address and use it as your primary account. You should be aware that unless you go some extra effort then all emails you send from that account will be from that email address (test123@example.co.uk) which sort of breaks the different identities policy I have been trying to setup.
See: Configure an Outlook.com account to use a 3rd party email address | QuantumWarp
Email Account Clean-up
Now you have all of your brand new email accounts configured as you want it would be a good time to delete and get rid of any other emails addresses that you had or partly used. This keeps things neat. Before deleting them, make sure you will not be removing access to any services you have signed up for.
Checklist
- Select required Online Social Identities
- Select an appropriate username
- Create the required email addresses with the selected username
- Configure recovery information (Mobile Phone and Email)
- Enable Two Factor Authentication (optional)
- Select a primary email account
- Setup email forwarding to your primary email account