It’s Time to Change Your Email Address

What would you rather have – someone’s cell phone number, or their email address?

If you wanted to reach them immediately, of course you’d want their cell phone number.

Why? You can send them a text.

Even if people don’t have smartphones, they can receive text messages.

My mom and dad are in their 90’s, and they can receive text messages on their tablets.

What does this mean for your school? If you have an “emergency notification” system set up for your school, the preferred method of contact should be text

I use quotation marks because if your school has one (and it should), that’s probably how it was sold to you. It should actually be used as an “urgent communication” tool, for 2 reasons.

First, people pay more attention to texts than emails. The key safety phrase is “Don’t text and drive” today. Hardly anyone says “Don’t email and drive,” even though you can do that on your smartphone too.

Second, email from your school can land in a spam file, especially if you use a free service like Gmail, Yahoo or Hotmail.

It would be unfortunate if an urgent communication from your school landed in a parent’s spam folder. Once it lands there, chances are that anything you send your parents through email will land there too if parents never check their spam or junk folder and “whitelabel” it as “not junk.”

And most people never check it.

But why should YOU consider changing your email address? Because it’s a security precaution.

The past 3 companies that I’ve worked for have given me the email address of “mziemski” followed by the company’s Web site URL. After all, there aren’t that many Ziemskis working in the companies I’ve worked for, and if there were, chances would be slim that there would be a Mike and a Mark. IT departments also have protocols to deal with more common surnames, like Smith or Jones.

At about the same time I started working for the first of the 3 companies mentioned above, we were also connected with email at our home. Since I had “mziemski” at work, I signed up for an “mziemski” personal email address with a provider known as PeoplePC. I carried the “mziemski” through to Gmail when the current area of connectedness began.

The problem is that there are other “mziemski”s in the nation, and more and more people are connecting to the Internet every day.

What does this mean for my personal email address?

There are other legitimate “mziemski”s who sign up for a new Redbox account, a Netflix account, or an online service can use my email address as their preferred method of contact. This way, they won’t receive newsletters, discount offers, payment reminders or surveys.

Gmail’s solution is to “just delete the email,” but if they sign up for some type of unsavory service, then it looks like I’m the one who’s subscribing to it.

While these companies are insistent that they are protecting their customers’ privacy by not contacting them to inform them of their incorrect profile information, the problem is that they may be sending personal identification information to unintended and unauthorized recipients.

Therefore, if your email is a simple “first initial first name/last name” email formula, and you have a “free” email service, consider using your middle initial, a dot or some other type of special character, or a number that you can remember. Or, choose a non-standard email formula, such as the first two letters of your proper first name, the first two letters of your middle name, and first two letters of your last name as your personal email address. Put a special character or number in there as well.

That would be an address difficult for someone else to “mistakenly” use, and it will help cut down on the amount of true “spam” email you get.

Then there’s your “school” email address.

There’s a disturbing trend among IT professionals to use a “[email protected]” format for school personnel.

Your email is personally identifiable information (PII) and needs to be protected. Banks know this. It’s why an email address can be associated with only one person.

The problem is that there has been so much churn in school administration that it’s become a common practice for a school leader to have an email address like “[email protected].” Then, when a new principal is appointed, the IT department doesn’t have to change the email address; the new principal just needs to change the password.

Then a person that has emailed the previous principal sends another email, and the new principal doesn’t recognize it, and marks it as “spam.” Unfortunately, if the person that has sent the email has a business relationship with the school, then it will be very difficult for those individuals to connect.

And sometimes, it not only blocks the email address but any emails that come from the same domain.

Best practice: Demand a name-based email from your IT department, not a position-based one.

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