I have a first name only email forwarding account at a "well known Easter technical school." (I signed up first thing when these were made available at a time when a lot of people still weren't on the Internet.) I don't get as many random emails as I once did but, at one point, I even got on an email thread involving board discussions at some company.

ha! i can up you. last year got invites to some chinese gov stuff intended to a consul of some country with my same first/last name as me. they had a bunch of emails @gmail and @yahoo and a couple @country.gov, and apparently mixed a few.

Should have taken that free trip to shengze or something :)

> well known Easter technical school

Derived from a well-known Passover technical school?

You can always drop the few dollars a year for a vanity domain. No one has ever accidentally typed/used [email protected]!

This is exactly why I:

1. Use a handle that is a deliberate misspelling of an archaic name, and;

2. Use an archaic spelling of my surname as a vanity domain.

I wonder if you have trouble giving your email over the phone.

I have a <name>@<name>.net email. And every time I'm spelling my email to someone, I say: name, n a m e @name.net, 99 times out of 100 they ask me if the second "name" is spelled like the first one.

I have a friend whose surname was McCurry (which she rarely used - family baggage) and she ended up changing it to Blake, because you never have to spell out Blake to people, but you do every time with McCurry.

Yeah .... I had the same problem with a common first name + last name @gmail - even to the extent of getting someone else's buddy passes for JetBlue - before getting my own domain. I thought it wasn't bad for my purposes, but it's a terrible domain name for spelling out (my handle here plus .com).

Don't Googlers have mailboxes on the google.com domain directly? Gmail has only been around since April 1, 2004.

Some worked on gmail and were in the right place at the right time for personal mail. You keep it after you leave.