Role name versus person's name for email accounts

I'm looking for best practise suggestions here.

What are the reasons for and against using role names as email account prefixes versus the user's name? I.e.

"[email protected]" vs. "[email protected]"
or
"[email protected]" vs "[email protected]"

And additionally, are there any special cases where the 'general rule' should not apply? Like for certain roles? eg. "reception", "contact", "helpdesk", "admin"??

I just need more awareness of the pros/cons so I have more to go to management with.

Solution 1:

The main reason for role addresses is people change jobs.

It's much easier to change a mail server alias so reception@ or sales@ points to the new staff member or a team's mailing list than to contact every client that has ever received that address and request they change their address books.

Addition for clarity:

From a business perspective, clients want make sure they can always get in touch with someone to help them, yet have access to specific staff members for client/account management or higher level support/sales when appropriate.

To achieve this goal, my recommendation is to use both both techniques; staff should have personalised/named accounts, and be members of a alias or mailing/distribution list for their department, role or branch -- whatever delineation makes sense.

What address is given out or used then becomes a business decision of expected follow up / personal contact / historical knowledge required, staff turnover and how "general" client requests are (example, password resets can be performed by any helpdesk staff member)

For front line customer-facing roles, departments with high turnover or where requests can be completed by any staff member, clients can be provided the alias (support@, sales@, reception@) for that department, guaranteeing someone from that department will receive their mail and be able to look after them. When a staff member leaves or changes role, it then becomes a matter of changing the alias or mailing list subscription.

For roles where a high level of personal contact, historical knowledge, or where the work can only be performed by specific staff members, contact can be made using the named account. I'd recommend the client should be provided with an alias address as well so they are not left out in the cold when a staff member leaves the company or is on leave.

Solution 2:

It definitely depends on the context - named accounts should be for when people would want to communicate to that person specifically (e.g. 'send this file to John in accoutns'), while role accounts are very useful for when you don't care who is currently doing that job, just that they get your message (e.g. 'notify reception that I'm expecting a visitor').

You might even have some people with personal accounts and responsible for, or with access to, role accounts - for example helpdesk workers: customers might intially send email to 'helpdesk@....' and then recieve a reply from 'ann.other@...'. That's how we have it at my company and it works very well for us.

Solution 3:

I usualy make distributions groups with roles names and put into the group the persons concerned,if there's only one persone i'll do it anyway so there's always one email adress per person and at least one email adress per role.