Role name versus person's name for email accounts

Question

I'm looking for best practise suggestions here.

What are the reasons for and against using role names as email account prefixes versus the user's name? I.e.

"reception@domain.com" vs. "mary.jane@domain.com"
or
"developer13@example.com" vs "john.smith@example.com"

And additionally, are there any special cases where the 'general rule' should not apply? Like for certain roles? eg. "reception", "contact", "helpdesk", "admin"??

I just need more awareness of the pros/cons so I have more to go to management with.

Answer 1

The main reason for role addresses is people change jobs.

It's much easier to change a mail server alias so reception@ or sales@ points to the new staff member or a team's mailing list than to contact every client that has ever received that address and request they change their address books.

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Addition for clarity:

From a business perspective, clients want make sure they can always get in touch with someone to help them, yet have access to specific staff members for client/account management or higher level support/sales when appropriate.

To achieve this goal, my recommendation is to use both both techniques; staff should have personalised/named accounts, and be members of a alias or mailing/distribution list for their department, role or branch -- whatever delineation makes sense.

What address is given out or used then becomes a business decision of expected follow up / personal contact / historical knowledge required, staff turnover and how "general" client requests are (example, password resets can be performed by any helpdesk staff member)

For front line customer-facing roles, departments with high turnover or where requests can be completed by any staff member, clients can be provided the alias (support@, sales@, reception@) for that department, guaranteeing someone from that department will receive their mail and be able to look after them. When a staff member leaves or changes role, it then becomes a matter of changing the alias or mailing list subscription.

For roles where a high level of personal contact, historical knowledge, or where the work can only be performed by specific staff members, contact can be made using the named account. I'd recommend the client should be provided with an alias address as well so they are not left out in the cold when a staff member leaves the company or is on leave.

Answer 2

It definitely depends on the context - named accounts should be for when people would want to communicate to that person specifically (e.g. 'send this file to John in accoutns'), while role accounts are very useful for when you don't care who is currently doing that job, just that they get your message (e.g. 'notify reception that I'm expecting a visitor').

You might even have some people with personal accounts and responsible for, or with access to, role accounts - for example helpdesk workers: customers might intially send email to 'helpdesk@....' and then recieve a reply from 'ann.other@...'. That's how we have it at my company and it works very well for us.

Answer 3

I usualy make distributions groups with roles names and put into the group the persons concerned,if there's only one persone i'll do it anyway so there's always one email adress per person and at least one email adress per role.

Answer 4

There's a reason email aliases were developed. They make it much easier when people change roles.

for certain roles? eg. "reception", "contact", "helpdesk", "admin"??

RFC 2142 gives a list of email addresses one should reasonably expect for any domain.

Answer 5

Personal named account one for everybody, and it doesn't truly matter if you go with firstname.lastname@domain.com or the shorter firstinitial+lastname@domain.com - role-named accounts are unnecessarily demoralizing (nobody wants to feel like they're reception2).

Role-named addresses are great for groups. This lets people send mail to a box that numerous people check, or that gets distributed to a group that is easily managed by you.

• Purchasing: your supplies still get ordered even if half the department is on vacation

• Sales: quickest response is a good thing

• Helpdesk: same

• US-Employees, Contractors - HR loves time-saving groups like these, to help them send out benefit information to the right subgroup

Finally, if you hook these addresses to a central-directory logon at some point in the future, everyone will NEED a distinct account that is traceable to only them, so you can manage permissions and auditing correctly.

Bear in mind that generally, if someone wants to send email as Sales, rather than send out their own name in the return-to address, that'll be possible by granting send-as permissions.

Answer 6

I would definitely NOT use role names. Just my two cents, but when people have a role account and not their own personal account they tend to share it around and give out the password. If that's not a problem then go for it~

It's also easier to manage a group-based infrastructure in my opinion. Make groups for those roles and assign individuals.

Also, what do you do when someone changes roles? Happens a lot where I work~

Answer 7

There are no "best practices". It's all down to what is decided for any particular organisation. With that in mind, The only time I see role based email addresses is for generic roles, where frequently more than one person handles that email. e.g. support@someplace.org

I think you'll find that in general most people and companies prefer to use name based email addresses. Of course there's no "standard" for how they are generated. You'll see every conceivable combinatiuon of names and initials, either all joined together or separated by a dot, dash or underscore.

My suggestion is to give careful consideration to the role each person has and whether that role is or will be performed by multiple people, who will all access the same email account. Choose an email address as appropriate.

Answer 8

We use role based names for general accounts, "applicaiton_support@domain.com" or "sales@domain.com". These accounts are often shared by several people. There are normally used for initial contacts when people don't have a specific person to contact.

Answer 9

To throw some cents in here:

Every user gets an individual account and email address. Users who work in "role" positions (purchasing, support, etc) are encouraged or required by policy to use the "role" address when performing their "role" duty. (The individual accounts are necessary to allow auditing of individual user activities.)

I particularly like to use role accounts in vendor relationships. I like to have things like:

• Microsoft.Volume.License.Contact@xxx.domain.com
• Symantec.Support.Contact@xx.domain.com
• etc

I've been the contractor filling in for departed sysadmins on many, many occasions, and having to go thru a long list of vendors removing and replacing the old sysadmin is a complete waste of time.

I wouldn't constrain this to IT vendors. I'm just using them as an example. In the end, flexibility in controlling the delivery of future emails and decoupling "the role" from "the person" are good things.