Professional Email Addresses

Why ownership is the requirement

It comes down to ownership. A credible applicant can prove it owns the domain its address runs on.

Funding banks require email domains owned by the applicant. Google owns gmail.com. Microsoft owns outlook.com. A party writing from one of those addresses owns nothing in it — only permission, granted at will and revocable at will. Anyone can open one in any name, in a minute, verified by no one, and abandon it the same day.

Consider someone could register the email address donaldduck@aol.com and say that they are Donald Duck. Does that make the party authentically Donald Duck? No, but they can say they're Donald Duck. Right?

On the other hand, Magister Operis can prove on what date, at what exact time, and with what exact credit card Magister Operis has registered over 100 domains since 1997. That's the definition of accountability to a compliance officer and the funding banks.

Owning a domain produces the accountability banks require. The registrar records the exact date, time and payment instrument. Every renewal extends it. That record is held by a third party, it is checkable, and it cannot be created retroactively.

• If you already own a domain, there is nothing to do here. Use an address on it for the transaction and its documents. If you do not, the whole requirement is three steps: register a domain, add mail to it, and put that address on the paperwork.
• A paid business plan on any provider, carrying your own domain, satisfies the requirement in full. Encrypted providers — Proton, Tuta, Hushmail and others — run your own domain on their encrypted servers. The mail is encrypted; the domain stays yours. Encryption is encouraged, and is a separate matter from ownership.
• A website is not required, though it adds credibility to an applicant. What is required is owning the domain name of the email address being used within professional transactions. A site on the same domain provides professional consistency across an organization. A small correct site — who the entity is, what it does, who runs it, how it is reached — is a few hours of work with tools now commonly available. It does not need to be elaborate. It needs to be accurate and to agree with the documents in every particular: a site that contradicts the file is worse than no site at all.
• Cost to correct: about ten minutes and often less than ten dollars. A domain registration runs roughly ten to fifteen dollars a year at any of a number of established registrars, and first-year promotions below a dollar are common. Maintaining an email account on that domain is a few dollars a month, depending on the plan. The figures are stated because they remove the explanation. A party presenting a hundred-million-dollar transaction from a free address was not prevented by cost or by time, and does not make a good first impression on a group of former bankers supported by internationally recognized accounting and law firms.
• Owning the domain is only half of it. The address then has to appear on the documents — letterhead, signature blocks, engagement letters, contact schedules and every party’s details throughout the file. Find and Replace in Microsoft Word will often do it in seconds.