The importance of a professional email address

It’s very important nowadays to have a professional sounding email address, even if it’s just for your own personal use. Of course, we all know that hasn’t always been the case.

Back in the dark days of the early internet, before the likes of Gmail and Outlook, spam filters weren’t nearly as advanced. This meant that many people were a lot more careful about using their own names online (and it was more fun to be extra inventive!). As a result, many first email addresses might seem entirely baffling in their word choice and have us questioning their construction.

Naturally, this got us thinking – what could be some of the UK’s worst (but also funniest) first email addresses?

But first, let’s clear up what actually goes into creating a professional email address.

How to choose a professional email address

Creating a professional email address for yourself is very important in the digital age we've found ourselves in – especially if you don't' want to end up in the recipient's spam folder! This goes for both personal and business email accounts, so you can look professional no matter where you’re emailing from.

The following are our top 5 tips to help you out:

1. Use only your first name and surname in your email address

Doing this instantly lets the receiver know who an email is from and makes them far more likely to actually respond. Alternatively, you could include the initials of any of your middle names, and if you don’t want to use your full name, then you can use your primary initials and surname instead. If it's a business email, you should use your company name instead of your own.

2. Set up an alias to show your company or department name

If you plan to use your email address for your business, you can specify which department you're in. This lets the reader know specifically where it’s from, but they can still see your business name in the second part of your email address so they know it’s legit.

3. Don’t use any numbers in your email address unless absolutely necessary.

Spam and other more malicious email addresses often include numbers in their email address, so you should avoid using them in yours unless it’s part of your company name.

4. Use your domain in your email address

When creating a personal email, using Gmail or Outlook is perfectly fine and lets the receiver know you're using a trusted email service provider. But to really give your business a professional look, your company emails should use a personalised domain name.

5. Choose the right domain extension

When constructing your personalised domain, be sure to select the appropriate extension to go with it. An example of the top-level domain part of an email would be .com. So if you’re a commercial business, .com is fine. But if you’re an organisation, then .org should be your go-to choice, or .uk would be great for UK businesses.

Now that you know how to get started creating a more professional email, let’s turn our attention back to the reason you’re here – seeing the best and funniest first email addresses we could find.

Revealed: the UK’s top 5 first email addresses

To find our list of top first email addresses, our team polled different people around the country of all ages, ethnicity, gender, location, and profession to see what juicy treasures we could uncover.

Once we had enough responses, we narrowed down our list to our favourite 30 email addresses. However, picking our top 5 proved to be no easy task. Some of the responses we got were hilarious, others bizarre and weird, and a few were downright cringeworthy and embarrassing. But, after much discussion, we finally settled on our selection.

Without a doubt, our best candidate for the funniest first email address has to be mindyourownbusiness@gmail.com. We get the sense that whoever created this email address didn’t want to be disturbed. And we can only imagine the confusion people suffered when they got a reply to their emails, and perhaps the little chuckle the creator got every time they sent one.

Our second favourite is certainly a quirkier entry – the creator of princess_of_mirkwood_1@hotmail.com is clearly a fan of The Lord of the Rings. While having access to emails in that story would no doubt have made defeating Sauron a lot easier, we certainly wouldn’t suggest merging your favourite fandom into your email address today.

Next, we have sexychicken88@hotmail.co.uk. This address certainly uses 'unique' word choices, though its creator would have to be clucking mad to think they could get away with using such a combination nowadays. Even for a personal email address, it might be a bit eccentric. No doubt its creator cringed as hard as we did when they remembered it.

Our fourth pick continues the trend of the bizarre. Satansteddybear@yahoo.co.uk definitely gives character to the email address, and likely got some laughs when the odd email inevitably slipped into someone’s inbox. Whether those emails got opened, however, is a different matter entirely.

And finally, our number five spot goes to the fabulous glitterboy@gmail.com. Likely to have raised eyebrows from anyone they emailed, it’s probably not an email address you want to be using to contact clients.

Of course, while these might be our top 5, we can’t help but mention some of our other favourites. Here are 5 addresses that only just missed the cut:

• iamnotthequeen@yahoo.com
• notyouagain@gmail.com
• honeymonster59@outlook.com
• sexybee1981@yahoo.co.uk
• uglynose@btinternet.com

Want to checkout the full list? We've put our top 30 email address below. Feel free to take a look and pick your own favourites.

If our list of first email addresses has you thinking about your own, we've got you covered with our Email Hosting. Plus if you don't have a personalised domain name yet, we can help with that too! And remember, you can find even more interesting insights and helpful guides on navigating the internet over on the Fasthosts blog. If you need a hand with anything feel free to get in touch, our team are here to help 24/7.