Hell is losing your e-mail address
OK, I'm going to admit to doing something really dumb recently.
I went into my Verizon Online account to add an additional e-mail address, and I accidentally removed my main work e-mail address.
I realized the mistake pretty quickly and rushed to fix it. But when I tried to put my old e-mail address back a message popped up to say the username wasn't available.
I took a deep breath. I called Verizon and Alfonso, the e-mail support manager, said it would take six months before my old e-mail address becomes available again.
This means thousands of my contacts can't reach me, and all the editors I do contract work for will be wondering what happened to Eve.
How can any business survive after losing its primary e-mail address?
Turns out this happens to quite a few small businesses.
I figured I'd ask some business owners how they survive such a tragedy.
Mellanie True Hills, CEO of the American Foundation for Women's Health and www.StopAfib.org, a Web site for atrial fibrillation patients, told me her story in an e-mail:
We went through that early this year. It was awful, and it happened just as we were starting our busiest month of the year.
Our e-mail server that our Web host had us on lost the hard drive, and it took days to replace it. They kept saying they were restoring the data, but it never happened. We were down for days and days, and lost tons of e-mails; messages to us were bouncing for days. When it appeared that they weren't going to get it recovered in a timely manner, we changed Web hosts (including our Web site). We had been with them for 12 years, so it was very painful.
Fortunately, we had a working relationship with another ISP through another business we have, and they were kind enough to accommodate us very quickly. We used that e-mail address while the other was down, and we still use it. (This might be a good reason to have a separate domain for your e-mail and your Web site.)
I had backed up my whitelists and blacklists as well as distribution lists before the outage, and that was a huge help in getting us back in business. We were back up and in business long before our original ISP would have gotten us back into service.
[Mellanie later told me a "blacklist" refers to the people in your e-mail addresses list that you always block, while a "whitelist" contains addresses from which you always receive e-mail.]
And Zalmi Duchman, CEO of gourmet food delivery company The Fresh Diet, offered a similarly harrowing tale:
My company was originally named Zone At Home, and my Web site was ZoneAtHome.com, and all of the company's e-mail addresses ended with @ZoneAtHome.com
In 2007, one and a half years after I founded Zone At Home, I was forced to change the name to The Fresh Diet due to a lawsuit. My number one worry with the name change was the changes to my Web site and e-mails. I had sleepless nights -- not about the fact that I had to change my company's name, but over how I would get over the fact that all of my clients and ex-clients would need to know of these changes.
This was over a year ago, and now we're doing great and growing.
The number one way we found to combat the issue of the company name change was to reach out to our clients and figure out any way we could to forward their e-mails, or bounce back a new e-mail address.
We sent letters out to all of our clients informing them of the Web site change, and especially the change of e-mail address.
Phew, it’s good to hear there’s life after the death of an e-mail address.
