What you do – and say – with your email address can play an important role in your online reputation
Do you know where you left your email address online?
If the answer to that is no, you better go and do a quick check. Do an exact search for your own email address in Google (don’t forget to put ” “s either side of your email address).
What did you find?
Most of you will have found nothing.
Some will have found a few sites with your email address on it. They may be directories, social media networks, business forums – maybe even your own website. You should consider removing those email addresses wherever you can and replace them with a graphic text (basically a picture of your email address) to stop unscrupulous people spamming you.
If you found your email address on anything worse, then what are you doing reading this? You should be sorting it out right now! And what were you thinking of!!??
There is a serious point here. When people want to get a sense of you online, expect them to Google not just your name but your email address too. If you’ve foolishly left it somewhere you shouldn’t have then either remove it or, if that’s not possible, abandon it and create a new one, no matter how much trouble you have to go through.
And don’t think that just because nothing shows up for your email address you’re in the clear. Persistent people (yes, like me) will search for the bit before the @ too – especially if it’s a name you’ve clearly chosen yourself. Why? Because in my experience someone with the email address ‘kingkong99@hotmail.com’ is likely to go by the name ‘kingkong99′ in other places online too.
I did that with the email address of a recent contributor to this site. Now whether or not that person actually frequents a site for ’swingers, sex contacts and dogging fun’ I will never know. But can you afford to leave people even wondering?
One final thing: your choice of email itself can communicate a lot about you even if you’ve never been near a dogdy website in your life. A mate of mine’s email address is something like ‘treblevodkaandredbullwithice’. No problem when emailing your friends but maybe not something that will do you any favours when chasing that dream job.
