Share the love (and the organizational email addresses)
For things like hosting and domain accounts, setting up generic organizational email addresses is the answer.
Often in the course of a website project, we see folks scrambling to remember whose email is attached to things like hosting and domain accounts.
Sometimes, these accounts are even tied to people who no longer work for the organization. Eek!
Organization-associated emails solve the problem
We highly recommend creating and using generic organizational email addresses whenever you sign up for organization-wide accounts in the course of your workday.
1. Set up aliases and lists
Many email services like Google Workspace and Microsoft Outlook allow you to create aliases and/or lists. Then you can set these up to automatically forward incoming mail to individual email addresses for staff.
- For your website’s main administrative email, try something like “info@example.org.”
- You might only ever need one generic email address that you use for all your tools & accounts.
- But if your organization is bigger or has clear divisions of staff duties, additional generic email addresses might make sense. (For instance, for a domain registrar account, try “domains@example.org.”)
2. Decide where they forward to
Then you can decide at the organizational level who needs to actually receive or check these emails. For instance, maybe Barb and Kaitlyn need to see website comments that come in.
- So you set up “info@example.org” to forward to “barb@example.org” and “kaitlyn@example.org.”
- Or Barb & Kaitlyn could just check the “info@example.org” inbox weekly.
3. Remember to revisit as staff changes
It’s a good idea to revisit your lists and aliases every time a staff member leaves your organization or someone new is hired. Make sure the right people are getting the right emails in their inbox — and that no one unauthorized has access.
Your future self will thank you
We promise that setting up accounts and emails like this will save you a world of trouble in the future. Proactive thinking in this area will avoid all sorts of issues when folks change jobs or roles. And you’ll never have to scramble to find the right account login email again.
Top photo by Mathyas Kurmann on Unsplash.
