Email is good.

A blog ostensibly about email productivity by Chris Coyier who you can email, obviously, at chris@coyier.com

I’ve heard of people picking up a decent @gmail.com email address for their newborn child.

The spirit, I suppose, is that it’s already hard to get good names on the internet, and it will only get worse.

So if you named your kid Timberford Jones, maybe you should make the rounds at all the sites. Get TimberfordJones at Facebook and YouTube and TikTok and every other place you can, so they’ll have a premium name when they are old enough to care. And if those services are irrelevant by then, who cares, it didn’t cost you anything anyway.

Eh. I’m ambivalent. I think the chances are pretty low that they will ever be useful and still lower that the kid is ever going to care. But other than the annoyingness of land grabs in general it doesn’t hurt anything too bad and you’re just trying to do right by your own.

Me, I’d get a domain name before anything else.

If you get the email address, another cute idea is to write them emails every once in a while, then when you give them the email address, the inbox will be filled with letters from you over the years.

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2 responses to “Email for Newborns”

  1. Sara Hill Avatar
    Sara Hill

    We did this and wrote our newborn emails for a year. Somehow it eventually got filled with so much spam/marketing email that we abandoned the idea. Related: I’m about fed up with email – I’m drowning in marketing spam emails and no matter how much I unsubscribe it’s like my email is out there in the universe and I will forever succumb to an onslaught of marketing email.

    1. Chris Coyier Avatar

      Bummer! That’s wild to me that a basically secret email address is still discovered and spammed. That does kinda make it useless, as giving an 18 year old kid (or whatever) an email address that’s absolutely deluged with spam isn’t much of a gift.

      I’m also sad about your fight against marketing spam. I imagine someone like you as kind of the perfect person who *should* fight. But I don’t know your details. (If you’re comfortable sharing…) is it, like, hundreds a day? More/less? What service?

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