December is now upon us and the Christmas rush has begun. This year you’ve promised yourself you will buy everyone great gifts, but finding the right gift is always tough. So what’s the answer? I recently found myself pondering some gift ideas for family and in my internet oriented mindset came up with a personalized email address.

It’s nothing new for most, having a personalized email like me@myname.com is now industry standard. However for those outside the industry, a personalized email address can be very impressive and exciting. Presenting a not so savvy family member with a theirname@surname.com email address is sure to get a great response.

The first step, is selecting the domain name. If you find yourself with a particularly rare surname you might be lucky enough to get yoursurname.com but in most cases this will be unavailable. Certainly for my surname and many other’s I checked, yoursurnamemail.com is available. If all else fails resorting to your regional domain name will likely yield better results. Ultimately you want to end up with something nice and personal such as john@doemail.com

Once you have selected a domain name, I figure there are two directions you can go. The first is to create the email accounts (or forwarders) yourself. You could then present the new address in a simple greeting card. The more exciting option would be to create a website where each family member can select their desired email, and manage it in an easy control panel. This would allow them to decide whether they want to use email forwarding or not. I would guess that most stubborn family members would be set in their ways with an old email address so simply forwarding would be the way to go.

One major advantage for such a service is the ability to offer it not only to close family, but extended family as well. By using a website to create and manage the family email addresses, it could be made so that everyone can see email addresses for their extended family. This is likely to encourage more frequent communication between extended family, something that can be quite rare!

A quick side note, don’t forget that you will need some sort of hosting to create these email addresses. Also note, they will only last as long as the domain registration or hosting, so don’t forget to renew either!

It’s also possible to look at this idea from a business perspective. There are certainly already services out there offering such a service, but with the right spin and promotion it could be a great success. Offering an ‘all-in-one’ gift package could be one such spin. Automatically creating the email address, and issuing a personalized greeting card to the recipient. An even more personal twist on creating personalized family christmas cards!

That about wraps up my initial thoughts on this idea. Your thoughts and ideas are welcome below as always. I love reading and responding to all the comments you leave. This is the 20th article to be posted, a small but notable milestone. Thanks to all the readers so far.

Just a final reminder about the termination of the old feed. In under 1 hour the old feed will be no longer be available so please grab the new feed at http://feeds2.feedburner.com/cogroll in order to access all the new articles and ideas. Don’t forget to follow me on Twitter either, it contains lots of mini ideas and great links.

If you liked this idea and want more make sure to join the mailing list in the sidebar as soon some content will be available only to members.

Share This Idea

Tweet This Idea