What email address convention does your SaaS startup use?

We run a small SaaS startup and we're using GMail for Business. Each member of staff currently has a personal email address using their first name. For example [email protected], [email protected]...

We also have Gmail groups: [email protected] (this receives daily reports on the health of our system and is also used as a user account for our staff to log into our own systems), [email protected] (customer queries / complaints all come here), and [email protected] (this is what we advertise on marketing material including our website).

Emails sent to these GMail groups get distributed to the list of people in that group. For example emails sent to [email protected] get sent to both [email protected] and [email protected], but emails sent to [email protected] only get sent to Steve.

Now we're considering dropping the groups / distribution lists altogether, and instead creating individual accounts for each function. In other words we'd have an account for [email protected] where all support emails can be archived, and then dedicated support staff can simply log into this GMail account.

Which of the above two strategies is better - distribution lists (current strategy) or individual accounts that are shared? Is the first name convention a bad idea for personal email addresses? And lastly what email address convention should we use for our billing / accounts. I currently send out invoices once a quarter from my personal email address, and I always add a personalised message for each client.

Cheers from Cape Town!

For the personal email adresses, I see [email protected] used quite a lot by startups. For mature companies the form [email protected] is more common.

Between the two formats, I think it's a matter of taste and to some extent which signals you want to send between "approachable" vs "mature company". The only objective difference is that [email protected] is more scalable, i.e. you can grow to more people before you get a collision where two employees share the same name.

I think you are doing the right thing by using GMail distribution lists for [email protected] et cetera. Switching over to shared accounts would be going backwards -- how about password security for the shared account, and how will you see who has answered to a specific mail?

send out invoices [...] from my personal email address

Regarding distribution lists vs dedicated accounts, there is no right answer:

• The good thing about distribution lists, is that all the people who should get the email, do.
• The bad thing about distribution lists, is that many people end up reading the same email, whether they need to or not.
• The good thing about dedicated accounts, is that only the people who actively check the account see the emails.
• The bad thing about dedicated accounts, is that if no-one actively checks the account, no-one reads the emails.

Go with whichever system your team is most likely to get most value from. Alternatively, instead of relying on email, see what alternative options there are. Perhaps a nice big dashboard screen in the office that displays the system health, for example.