How to get a firstname.lastname email address with a common name?

I'd register my own domain then have that email point to a gmail account which can then send and receive as the firstname.lastname@superawesomedomain account. https://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=22370 has some help in that regard.

Like mikeh, I occasionally get email at my "firstname.lastname" account that is meant for people of the same name whose addresses are "firstname_lastname" or "firstnamelastname". In fact, I used to get email regularly from one girl's father that contained extremely personal medical and financial information. I'd write back pointing out the error, but he thought I was his daughter and playing a joke on him - it took me a month to convince him that he had the wrong email. Anyway, point being that I'd avoid the "two dots" solution as I think it'd make similar errors very common. If somebody gave me a two-dot address, I'd assume they'd made a typo or I'd misheard. I prefer the "firstname.middleinitial.lastname" solution. That being said, I think your idea of emailing people and offering to purchase their address has a shot of success. I registered "firstname.lastname" at different providers as they launched, and I never use the older addresses. If I got an email asking to buy one of them, I'd probably sell it for a token amount. If you went to college, the other thing you could investigate is alumni addresses - lots of universities offer "[email protected] addresses.

When I finally go onto gmail, my name was also taken. So I put my middle initial in there as well: [email protected].

Before paying for an address, find out if you have any friends with a domain who'd be willing to give you an address. Alternatively, you could find out if you have friends with similar needs and get them to help you offset costs or work for maintaining your own domain/mail server.

I asked a very similar AskMeFi thread once. Here's a link to it, if you'd like to comb it for more answers. http://ask.metafilter.com/20072/email-addresses-for-children-of-unimaginative-parents

There's a heap of Stephen Thomases, but there's still only one flabdablet as far as I know. Using [email protected] also makes life slightly harder for spammers - commonfirstname.commonsurname@wellknownprovider will get lots more spam than obscure.non.word@wellknownprovider.

I'd suggest just getting a domain and any one of the thousands of 5-10 dollar a month web hosting accounts that are available. You get a pretty much permanent email address, plus some web hosting space. If you want something profressional, you can do better than @yahoo/etc in my opinion. But then, I have a [email protected] email address, which is kind of cool. pobox.com might be another option as well.

Heh, I second SDF. I got my exceedingly common first name. Alone. This was, hm, back in 2000 or so, but still, it's not let me down and it does have some old-skool charm in it.

Thanks for all the responses. I'll be checking out the http://ask.metafilter.com/63615/How-to-get-a-firstnamelastname-email-address-with-a-common-name#957353 for http://ask.metafilter.com/63615/How-to-get-a-firstnamelastname-email-address-with-a-common-name#957413-known http://ask.metafilter.com/mefi/63615#957429 mail http://ask.metafilter.com/mefi/63615#957466 providers in a bit -- maybe I'll get lucky. The stories of mistaken identity are interesting -- I hadn't considered that aspect. More troubling than other people's clueless relatives sending sensitive information to me is the thought of MY clueless relatives sending personal info to one of the other harkin bankses out there. For those of you suggesting alternate versions (firstname.mi.lastname, lastname.firstname, etc.) at the major free webmail providers, they're pretty much gone. I'm not quite John X. Smith, but my name *is* very common. You know those automated kiosks at the airport where you swipe a credit card to check in? I used one last Thursday and there were three other people flying out of that airport on that day who shared my first and last name. I think I'll also send out a few emails to obvious variations of my name, just to see if anyone's willing to sell at a reasonable price. Domain registration and hosting costs what, a minimum of $30/yr? So if this is an address I want to keep for 10 years, I'd be willing to pay $250 - 300 to avoid the maintenance hassles. But if that fails then I'll register a domain (I have one in mind that's not taken yet) and just become [email protected]. Using Google Apps to run Gmail on mydomain.com sounds like a good solution -- I didn't know you could do that, thanks http://ask.metafilter.com/mefi/63615#957312!