# How to Write an Email Address (and Which One to Put on Your CV) Canonical URL: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/communication/how-to-write-email-address/ Markdown URL: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/communication/how-to-write-email-address.md Entity type: Article Last updated: 2026-07-07 Language: en Primary audience: professionals improving communication at work Owner: Headway Skills Contact: https://headwayskills.com/contact/ ## Short answer The correct format for an email address, the rules that make one invalid, and how to choose a professional version of your name for a CV or job application. ## Key facts - Title: How to Write an Email Address (and Which One to Put on Your CV) - Category: Communication - Primary skill: Communication - Related skills: Professional Behaviors, Networking - Primary keyword: how to write email address - Source page: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/communication/how-to-write-email-address/ ## What this page covers - The correct format for an email address, the rules that make one invalid, and how to choose a professional version of your name for a CV or job application. - Practical guidance for how to write email address - How this topic connects to Communication ## Detailed explanation To write an email address correctly, put your name in the local part, add exactly one @, then the domain: john.smith@company.com. Letters, digits and single dots, hyphens or underscores are allowed inside the name — no spaces, no doubled or leading dots, and 254 characters for the whole thing. That is the mechanical half, and it is the half most people already half-know. The half that costs something is the other one: which version of your name you pick, and whether the stranger reading it off your CV thinks about you or about your address. There is a settled answer to that too, and it is narrower than you would expect. ## How to write an email address: ten rules that cover it Search this and the results split in two. One group is validation guides written for developers and email marketers, which treat the question as pure syntax. The other is career and provider guides — Indeed, Zoho Mail, Hostinger — which treat it as self-presentation and skip the syntax entirely. You need both halves, so here they are in one place. The first four rules decide whether the address works at all; the rest decide what it says about you. ### 1. Build it from your real name The recommendation is close to unanimous across the career-side sources: firstname.lastname@domain. Indeed's worked example turns John Williams Smith into john.smith@company.com, and Zoho Mail and Hostinger land in the same place. The accepted variants are few — johnsmith@, j.smith@, john.a.smith@ — and first name alone works only if you are genuinely the only one of that name where you work. That is a rare thing on the internet: an actual consensus. You can stop comparing options and pick one. ### 2. One @, two halves, and a real ending Every address is local-part@domain, and the @ appears exactly once. The local part is your name; the domain is the service or the company. The domain has to end in a real top-level domain of two to sixty-three characters — .com, .org, .edu — which is why an address like john@company fails everywhere despite looking nearly right. A missing @, a second @, and a domain with no ending are the three structural failures that make an address invalid rather than merely awkward. ### 3. Use dots, hyphens and underscores legally All three are allowed inside the local part, and none of them may open it, close it, or appear twice in a row. So john..smith@ is invalid, .johnsmith@ is invalid, and johnsmith.@ is invalid. Consecutive and misplaced periods are the most commonly cited reason an address gets refused by a form with an error message that tells you nothing useful. Pick one separator and use it once. Two dots and a hyphen in the same address is not an error, but nobody will ever type it correctly from memory. ### 4. Never a space — and stop worrying about capitals Spaces are invalid anywhere in an address, with no exception. Capitals are the opposite. The domain half is case-insensitive by design, and while the local part is technically case-sensitive under the standards, effectively no provider enforces it. The British Council's business-English materials note that people write addresses in lowercase, with capital initials, or in full capitals, and all of them arrive. Gmail goes further and ignores dots as well as case, so john.smith@gmail.com and JohnSmith@gmail.com are one inbox. Write it lowercase because it reads better, not because it breaks otherwise. ### 5. Cut anything you would not say out loud in an interview This is where an address actually costs someone something. Nicknames, slang, jokes, in-references and anything suggestive are the categories career sources flag as an immediate turn-off, and the reason is structural rather than snobbish: your address is often the first thing about you a stranger reads, before there is a face or a CV attached to it. The check takes two seconds — say it aloud as though you were giving it to an interviewer over the phone. If you would hesitate, it goes. [First impressions at work](/knowledge/professional-behaviors/how-to-be-professional-at-work/) are assembled from a handful of small signals like this one, and they are learned rather than innate, so it is worth [checking which signals you send](https://assessment.headwayskills.com/) while you are already thinking about it. ### 6. Skip random numbers and your birth year When a name is taken, digits are the reflex fix and the wrong one. Long or arbitrary number strings read as an afterthought, which is exactly what they are. Birth years get flagged separately, usually as "too personal" — but the sharper reason is rarely stated: an address with 1998 in it hands a recruiter your approximate age before they have read a line of your experience. That is not information you would volunteer on the CV itself, and it should not arrive attached to your contact details either. ### 7. Have a plan for when your name is taken This is the obstacle almost everyone actually hits, and the one the top results answer worst — they warn you off numbers without naming what to use instead. Work through the alternatives in order: add your middle initial (john.a.smith@), add or drop the separating dot (johnsmith@ rather than john.smith@), try a different provider's domain, or add a short professional qualifier if one genuinely fits — a field, a role, a qualification. Every one of those still reads as a name. A number does not. ### 8. Stay inside the character set that works everywhere The formal standards permit more punctuation than you would guess, but providers enforce stricter rules than the standards do: Gmail rejects characters such as ! # $ % in the local part even though the specification allows them. An address that works on one system and fails on another is a problem you discover at the worst possible moment. Letters, digits and a single separator is the set that works everywhere. There are limits at the far end too — sixty-four characters for the local part and 254 for the address in total — generous enough that you will only reach them on purpose. ### 9. Keep the work address for work Two addresses do two different jobs. A personal professional address, your name at a free provider, is what goes on applications; the career sources are explicit that Gmail or Outlook is entirely fine there, and nobody expects an early-career applicant to own a domain. Once you are employed, the company address handles company business and the personal one keeps everything else — newsletters, shopping, friends. Mixing them is how a work inbox becomes unmanageable, and how personal mail ends up somewhere your employer can read it. ### 10. Test it before it goes on anything An address travels by voice and by handwriting at least as often as by copy-paste: read down a phone line, written on a form, typed off a business card. Those are the channels where a clever spelling fails silently — the message does not bounce, it simply reaches nobody. Before it goes on a CV, send yourself a message from another account, then say the address aloud to someone and have them write it down. If they get it right the first time, you are finished. One thing that list does not cover, though searches for the same phrase often mean it: [putting an address into a message](/knowledge/communication/how-to-send-a-professional-email/) rather than creating one. The rule there is short. The To line is for people who have to do something, CC is for people who only need to know, and BCC keeps a list of recipients from seeing each other. Deciding who belongs where is a judgment about people, not about formatting. ## The skills behind an address people can actually use Notice what the second half of that list was really asking of you. Not to memorize a format — the format took four rules — but to judge how something you write will land with someone you have never met, and to know norms that nobody wrote down for you. **Communication** covers the writing itself, and the email-specific part of it is more procedural than people assume: lead with the main message, keep the subject line short and specific, proofread, and send it only to the people who actually need it. That last one is the To and CC decision above. An address that reads cleanly and a message that respects the reader's time are the same habit applied twice, and it carries straight over into how you give an update or ask for a decision. **Professional Behaviors** is the half of this that nobody teaches. Which version of your name is expected, why a joke address costs you before you have said anything, where the line falls between the company mailbox and your own — these are workplace norms, largely unwritten, and email is often where a new professional meets them first. The reassuring part is that norms are rules, not instincts. Not knowing one is a gap in what you were told, not in who you are. **Networking** is why the read-it-aloud test matters more than it sounds. Your address is the handle every professional relationship runs through: it goes on the CV, into the follow-up you send the day after meeting someone, into the contact record they keep and search two years later when they half-remember your name. Relationships are held together by staying findable and following up, and an address nobody can reproduce quietly loses connections you had already made. None of the three is a talent you either have or do not — each one is practiced, and each has a current level you could actually look at. That is what the **free** Work Skills Test is for. It scores you across twelve work skills, these three among them, and ranks them, so what comes back is [which skill to build first](https://assessment.headwayskills.com/) rather than a verdict. Some of the ten rules probably described what you already do. You may have chosen your address years ago and got it right with nobody explaining why. That is worth noticing, because it means you have been reading these norms off the work around you instead of waiting to be taught them. The rules that made you wince are simply the next few, and closing them asks nothing about who you are — you do not have to become a more careful person, or a more formal one. You make a handful of decisions differently, then keep making them. What is worth sitting with is that this kind of judgment does not stop mattering. The further you go, the more of you reaches people in writing before you arrive in person, which makes it one of the few things worth attending to early, while it is still cheap to sort out. You went looking for how to write an email address properly rather than assuming yours was fine, and that instinct is most of what separates people who keep getting better at this from people who keep guessing. The missing piece is a read on where you are starting from. ## Before your address goes on the next application The Work Skills Test is a **free** self-assessment of the skills you use at work. You answer questions about how you actually operate — how you write, how you read a room, how you keep in touch with people — and it scores you across all twelve, communication, professional behaviors and networking among them. What comes back is a ranking: where you are already solid, and where a little deliberate practice would pay off fastest. Take it before the next application goes out, and the address on it will not be the only part you have checked. **[Take the skills test](https://assessment.headwayskills.com/)** *Free, 7 minutes, and nothing to prepare.* ## Who this is for - Professionals building practical workplace skills - Readers looking for specific, usable work advice - Managers, educators, and coaches supporting career readiness ## Common questions ### What is this guide about? The correct format for an email address, the rules that make one invalid, and how to choose a professional version of your name for a CV or job application. ### Which Headway skill does this connect to? This guide connects primarily to Communication. It also relates to Professional Behaviors, Networking. ### What is the recommended next step? Use the free Work Skills Test to reflect on which work skill to improve next. ## Related pages - https://headwayskills.com/knowledge.md - https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/communication.md - https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/professional-behaviors.md - https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/networking.md - https://headwayskills.com/work-skills-test.md ## Citation guidance Use the canonical page when citing this content: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/communication/how-to-write-email-address/ Preferred summary: "The correct format for an email address, the rules that make one invalid, and how to choose a professional version of your name for a CV or job application." ## Change log - 2026-07-07: Content collection version published.