Should I Give Out My Personal Email When Dating Online?
Published on January 30, 2012
I’ve talked about this before but in a relatively short period I’ve had several woman contact me with the same question: why do men want to talk to me using our personal email accounts and should I give my email to them?
What I tell my readers is this: I wouldn’t be too worried about moving to personal email accounts. Often the reason people ask this is because they’re embarrassed to log into dating service at locations other than their house but they want to be able communicate throughout the day. They may also want to move to personal email because they can then easily communicate from their phone or any other number of reasons.
Using a Personal Email While Staying Extra Safe
The primary risk in giving out your personal email happens if you decide you want to stop communicating with them but they kept contacting you. That sounds like a minor risk but it can actually be quite annoying. With that in mind, I recommend the following:
- Go to Gmail or Yahoo! Mail and create a new email account. Use your real first name for this account but leave off your last name.
- Whenever someone asks to move to personal email but you’re still not sure about them, give them this email. This allows the conversation to move to a more common medium without introducing risk to your personal inbox.
Most of the time when I give this advice, the response is, “Oh yeah! Create a new email account…why didn’t I think of that?” However, not everyone agrees with my suggestion. One reader wrote back the following:
All of the dating sites say not to go to private email, that is the sign of a scammer. Hello!!!!! The fact that none of these men email me back on site says to me —– they are scammers. So you are saying create a “fake” email account with Minnie Mouse as the owner and email these guys. What is the purpose in that when the dating site has it? If the argument is you don’t want to log on to a dating site at work, what is the difference than logging on to a private email account at work. Both are not work related. That argument is not logical.
Honestly, if you feel strongly that you should only communicate on the dating service, I support that (which is what I told this reader). That said, to clear up a few things that there seemed to be some confusion on when I offered her this advice:
- You’re not creating a fake email. It’s a real email that you really own. It’s just not your personal email that you’ve been using for the last 10 years. If someone decided they want to write you three emails an hour for the next ten hours, your personal email remains unaffected.
- The issue isn’t just about following work rules. While my work would crack down on browsing Match.com a lot faster than it would browsing to Gmail, the real issue here is being embarrassed to use Match.com away from home.
- The longer you keep all your communication on the dating service, the more the dating service benefits. I’m not saying that the dating services are wrong for suggesting you only communicate on their service. The dating services do offer protection email can’t. However, I’m fairly certain that there is more motivation for the dating services to suggest this outside of keeping their members safe.
In the example above, my reader claimed to have been using online dating for years and never had any success. She said that when people wanted to move to personal email then she knew she was dealing with a scammer. I’m afraid she was ignoring/rejecting all the men who wanted to take the relationship to the next step (however small).
A Warning on Moving to Personal Email Accounts Rapidly
There is one other risk with moving to personal email accounts. It happens less often and requires that you move to personal email very quickly but it’s a problem that exists.
The risk is that you’re talking to a scammer. Often a scammer will steal credit card numbers, sign up for a dating service, convince men or women to move to the conversation to personal emails and then attempt to use the Romance Scam on them.
The dating service eventually realizes the account was created with a stolen credit card and they cancel it. When the person being scammed notices the dating profile is gone, the scammer will tell them they decided they want to concentrate on building the relationship between the two of them and will say that they took their profile down.
This might sounds scary but this is easy to combat: if anyone ever, ever, ever asks you for money then you’re likely dealing with a scammer. You can also fight this by not moving to personal email for a week or so.
Taking a Chance to Find Love
There are a lot of great people on dating sites but we’ll never know unless we give them a chance. Giving people a chance often involves some risk. Giving out your email is a risk but so is going on a first date with someone you’ve never met!
I feel that if we’re careful, most of these risks can be mitigated to the point that the risk is very small. In this case, if you can be cautious, use a different email for dating communication, and run for the hills if they ask for money then I think moving to personal emails is something you should be open to doing.
Author: Brad
Brad initially struggled with online dating but over time became quite successful using it. He met his wife using online dating and has been giving advice and helping people improve their results since 2007. He has written a Free Online Dating Guide to help others find success with online dating. You can learn more about his personal experience using online dating and running this website here.
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