I must say gmail sucks in this regard. I have a ridiculously uncommon name (worldwide), but none of the numberless configurations got accepted. I am 99.99% sure that it is impossible for actual people to have taken these usernames and actually assumed gmail keeps these names free for some kind of payed subscriptions (do they even have these?)… so in the end I went with my name followed by the last two digits of my year of birth. Thusfar no one has complained.
My best friend was showing me an email or something that he’d printed out and it had a different email that I had ever used with him. (He lives in town now, so if I want to talk to him, I just call him. We are so old school!)
So he’s showing me something, asking my opinion and I read the new email address he uses.
He has a fairly common name, so he had to use numbers in it.
So it’s like: johnsmith420@isp.com
Me: Why do you have 420 in your email address?
Him: I needed a number and duh! That’s my birthday!
Me: Do you know what else it means? It’s a pot reference.
Him: <shock dawning on his face> What?? Omg, I use this for business! Holy shit, I’ve sent it out on RESUMES!
Me: yeah, it may have been why you had a hard time finding a job for awhile, sweetie. :rolleyes:
Heh. That’s pretty funny too.
I agree, In the early AOL days (and maybe still) it was common to have your first choice taken and AOL would automatically suggest that name with some random-ass numbers at the end, and a lot of people just said, “What the hell is email? I guess I’ll just click ‘Accept’.” (To this day an aol.com email address is looked down upon by the internet snobs.)
That’s not to say that it’s universally bad to use numbers in your email address, but there might be a minority of people out there who think so for such reasons.
Emails are just handles. Like phone numbers, their only value is being easy to get right. If they’re memorable or easy to deduce if you’ve forgotten them, that’s a bonus. And that pretty much punishes those with essentially arbitrary, random numbers in their email address. Anyone with my real name could figure out my main work email in a heartbeat; if someone lost my calling card, they could still get in touch provided they could remember the company I work for. (And considering the company I work for is well known, anyone suspecting me of abusing the address or misrepresenting the company could easily confirm my employment status with the IT department.)
My e-mail is my Dope name @yahoo.com My job coach had 0 problem with it.
I personally don’t think of anyone as less professional for any of this, but I suppose if you’re wanting to play the what’s professional in an email address game, then the focus should be more on the domain name than whether there are numbers in there. @gmail or @isp means
a) yourname@service is probably taken already
b) you can’t change providers without the hassle of telling everyone you have a new email address
c) the service could quit at any time and you’d have to do b)
d) (for the paranoid) the numbers you will choose in the case of a) will probably be personal in some way to you and could be a gateway to identity theft
Having your own domain gets rid of all of that. I’d say yourrealname.com isn’t a good idea as the basis for an email address either: yourreallname@yourrealname.com just doesn’t scan as well as yourrealname@yourdomain.com. But then, I’ve got a very commonplace first and last name and may be just jealous 
I’ve had my own domain for a decade and more and have never needed to change my personal email address despite many ISP changes. My hosting allows for unlimited addresses so my family get to avoid numbers too. In theory I could have specific purpose addresses, but in practice I don’t.
My mail gets pulled into a webmail provider that isn’t, but could be, gmail. I can change that whenever I want or need to. Sure, I get another address potentially full of letters and numbers, but I never give that out.
I had a number free address @isp when I worked for one - I avoided (a) in that instance: it was the first address set up when they got a new .com domain 
- (c) was incredibly likely at the time and indeed, did happen; hence my domain.
Having numbers and twee missing vowels in your domain name though - ick!
Numbers make it look like you were copying someone’s else email and you aren’t original enough to think up your own. Of course, this impression may only be valid for different professions. I notice that artists, photographers etc. tend to find email that are original.
Then again, it really depends on the entire email in context. If it just some phrases or names, or if the numbers are part of the mail, such as “ilove2eat”, that’s fine. However if ripping of anime or popular characters, like “CloudStrife772”, it does appears unsightly in a business or professional context.
I guess one way to use numbers is to add your year of birth behind it, such as alan82. Of course, you’re telling your real age to everyone…
Well, I’m still kind of confused. It was a personal email address, but a coworker was commenting on it. Was the coworker a friend who happened to be visiting? Did he use his personal email for something at work and a coworker happened to see? Do they always use personal emails for work stuff? Mostly it doesn’t matter, but it makes a (small) difference.
Maybe “professional” was the wrong word, but I think it roughly captures the opposite of “looking like you’re in high school” (even if the coworker was wrong to put a casual email address in that category).
I know this thread is 8 years old, but I’m not sure that was the case. I was able to obtain [noparse]surname@gmail.com[/noparse] with no issue. I have a pretty uncommon last name worldwide, but there’s probably a hundred of us in the US, and I would assume at least in the hundreds or low thousands in Poland (and I know there are others in South Africa and elsewhere.) Similarly, I was able to do the same with a Mac account (icloud/me.com/mac.com). It’s just my surname there as well.
Nobody should use numbers in any account name, email or not. It just reeks of childishness and unoriginality.
Especially ones with their birth year. It looks egocentric.
I think that as long as you avoid 69, 88, or 420, you are generally fine. I would also avoid too many digits. Maybe 5 if it is your zip code or 3 if it is your area code.