What are good ways to choose a professional/proper email name/address?

A few comments: Unless you have a strong personal brand, I would not suggest a name domain. I find it a bit too 90s. If you really want a name domain, make the domain your last name and then use your first name as the address (e.g. ) A good Gmail or Yahoo address is not that bad, as long as you can get your name. is fine, is not. But... I would recommend that you find a good, professional-sounding domain on GoDaddy and spend the 8.99 to buy it. Choose something generic but professional. Then set up a free email server account. Set up your first name @ the domain, plus some obvious extras (sales@, info@, etc.). If you really want to complete the illusion, you can also set up a nice but generic web site on the domain as well (Weebly is a good choice for this). Doing this is a cheap and professional way to have a slightly more impressive presence on the net. One other idea, by the way. If you attended a prestigious school, check to see if they offer alumni email addresses. is also a nice calling card.

Email addresses when you are a student, or from your employment will have their own formats, so I will address Personal email accounts. For Personal Email accounts, I am not an expert, but here are my thoughts and reactions: I am not impressed favorably by email addresses at "HotMail" or "Yahoo." Sorry, just my opinion. They don't seem serious. I have a negative feeling of email addresses at AOL, mostly as a feeling that people using AOL have AOL as their home page and are seeing the internet through the AOL filter. My feeling is that they are new to the internet, or never got off the on ramp. Again, just an opinion. I think that the best generic email domain is Gmail because Google is a serious and highly respected company. Also their free accounts have many great features and they do an AWESOME job filtering SPAM. I agree with Andrew Hennigan that the best short names are taken, and that "JohnSmith82" is not the format. Here is an example that I would use, if your name was Andrew James Harmon. I think that shorter is better, but remember that this is a personal email, and people responding or sending messages to you will at most only need to key in your email address one time. Mostly they will just click on it. So recognizable is more important than brevity. The following options are in the sequence I would try: Harmon@ AHarmon@ AJHarmon@ AndrewHarmon@ AndrewJHarmon@ AndrewJamesHarmon@ A.Harmon@ A.J.Harmon@ Andrew.Harmon@ AndrewJ.Harmon@ Andrew.James.Harmon@ NOTES: I personally do not like an underscore ( _ ) between words. The emails system does not like blank spaces and inserts an _ in their place. I have used capital letters as you would in normal writing. The email systems IGNORES capital letters, treating or converting them to lower case. BUT humans find it much easier to read and recognize the add address with the capitals Example: andrewjamesharmon vs. AndrewJamesHarmon I always advise customers to use capital letters in the same way with their domain names, unless they are so short and universally recognizable that it is not needed. So fedex or Fedex are both immediately recognized, as opposed to dogwalkingandshampoowithtlc vs. DogWalkingAndShampooWithTLC

First question is, Is this for a company or for personal use? This is a big detail that should be explained in your question. ("Professional" implies it has a business aspect, but not necessarily.) If it's for business, you probably want a business domain. An email with a Gmail suffix or any other email service suffix is the mark of a freelancer or non-professional. For the part before the @, use your name. It doesn't really matter if it's John, or JohnS, or John.Smith. Except that shorter names are easier to remember and type. I believe Steve Jobs at Apple had the address . If it's for yourself, either a hosted domain or email service provider domain will do. But with an email service provider, you are often forced to resort to second-class addresses ( for example ... much too long to be ideal) or else use lesser-known (and possibly inferior) email service providers. A hosted domain gives you much more flexibility. Plus you could connect it to either a paid Google Apps (http://www.google.com/google-apps) setup, or set up a separate Gmail account to vacuum the email out (https://support.google.com/mail/answer/21289?hl=en) — both of which allow you to benefit from Gmail's advanced email feature set with any hosted email account.

I would consider (giving) the convenience of communications with others first. I don't really care if you have your own domain. It's almost outdated in this age with people communicating over non-email means like Facebook, Instagrams, Twitter, Linked-In etc. I live in the Google world so Gmail accounts as the integration is much better from Google+ to sharing documents on Google Drives. Microsoft is also fine by me. I have that too. If you choose to go with some very esoteric email providers in which I have to go through hoops (e.g. anti-SPAM schemes to Secure Messaging Web Page, auto-reject if I added an image or file) to send a message, then as soon as I see those hurdles, I would stop right then.  many will see you are a problem for them to work with you down the line, and they will nip you in the bud. So I would rather find a major provider such as Microsoft, Gmail, iCloud, Yahoo etc that gives you a way to create a full name like John_Smith@....

for name-based domain emails work well. So is a good professional example for John Smith to follow. For the second example, I would like to clarify that the definition of what is  'professional' and 'proper' is different from what is conventional. There are about 7 or 8 conventions for email addresses and that's why it's easy to guess the email address of any company's CEO after a few tries. With that said, if all the seven conventions do not apply for a free email address provider (quite unlikely that this will happen) -conventions such as ,  , , etc, here are other alternatives:, .

Use this service: http://www.addressmarket.net You can get any email address you want. You can even edit the part after '@' symbol.Its a paid service but ridiculously cheap. Their prices start from $0.99 per year for some Top-Level Domains

If your full name is taken, try with your middle initial or full middle name in there, use "." too to separate if needed. Otherwise, nothing wrong with adding numbers to the email that are relevant to you - as long as your name is identifiable in the address, should be ok :)

For my own domain I prefer . For a public Domain . Disclaimer: My personal address (SteveF61) comes from the days when you were limited to 8 characters and I've carried it forward from Altavista (my first Open E-mail provider) through to Gmail & Yahoo.