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Comment by codegeek | Hacker News Reader

I would divide it up by business functions. "Contact", "team" etc are very generic. For example, both an exisiting customer and a prospective customer could tehcnically be "contacting" you. But you want to differentiate there. I would go for something like:

    Sales: sales@xyz.com

    Customer Support: customersupport@xyz.com

    Press release/inquiry: press@xyz.com

    Partners/vendors etc: partner@xyz.com

    Anything else: hello@xyz.com (This can be creative as you like)

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I think such a scheme is customer-unfriendly, especially for a small company where there isn't a compelling organizational need to have separate email addresses. For example, if an existing customer wants to both place a new order and get customer support, should they be expected to send two emails, one to sales and another to support? Also, I've noticed that once a customer gets a company's email address in their address book, that's the only email address they ever use. I've seen this first hand with customers emailing the support address to place new orders.

Well it is a little unfriendly (many emails to remember?) but I think it does help. While in a small company we tend to have overlapping roles, slowly our roles become more concrete. When that happens, a mail to say payments@ will immediately tell the payments guy that he has to do something although many others may be cc-ed. Or it may tell the customer that sending a mail to the specific topic email address might get a faster response.

Secondly, like how we all know that company.com/about usually takes us to the team page, the press might try to hit up press@. There is always a fallback - the contactus@ but when the number of emails start exploding, it helps when tagging emails by purpose.

I posted this question precisely to avoid having too many aliases. I'd like the equivalent of "dialing 0" from your hotel room phone, and getting redirected by the front desk based on your request.

how about reachout@example.com

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