Use your email address as a backup for your clients

When clients get a new email address with an online email service (e.g., Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo, etc), they're often asked for a backup email address. The online service typically use this address to perform password recovery & administrivia.

Since our clients are first time users, they typically don't have a backup account and thus leave that field empty. You can help your clients by giving your email as the backup account. That way, at least they have one more recourse when they need to recover their passwords.

Gmail has a feature that makes this easier. Gmail allows you to create arbitrary email addresses based on your username. For example, if your Gmail account is

yourname@gmail.com

you can use any email address of the form

yourname+XYZ@gmail.com

where XYZ can be any sequence of alphanumeric characters (e.g., student, backup, ctn, shopping, amazon, ebay, etc) and messages will still be delivered to

yourname@gmail.com

Thus, you can let your students use "yourname+ctnstudent@gmail.com" as their backup addresses. You can even get fancier by using "yourname+studentname@gmail.com" so that they each get a separate address. If you ever get spammed at one of those names, you can simply block one without affecting the others.