Enough is Enough - The Sunday Journalist new e-mail

The Evolution of a Digital Identity

If you have followed my writing over the years across Cole’s Notes or The View from the Plateau Substack, you know that maintaining a clean, efficient digital workflow is a core focus of my work. As part of a broader mid-summer digital decluttering and workflow upgrade for 2026, I am officially making a major structural change to how I manage my online publications and reader communications.

Effective August 1, 2026, I am retiring cole.cooper@gmail.com from its role as my public-facing blog and publishing contact for Cole's Notes.  Moving forward, all publishing, newsletter, and official media inquiries will be hosted directly under an new official email address: 

thesundayjournalist@gmail.com.

Alongside this technical shift, I am standardizing all public publishing under my long-standing pen name, Mark Coleman. For the time being - there will be two contributor profiles on the main Cole's Notes profile until I update the publishing system.

Here is a look at why this change is necessary, the security and identity issues driving it, and how this fits into a broader publishing strategy.

Drawing the Line: Personal Security vs. Professional Publishing

Let me be clear on one critical point: I am not surrendering cole.cooper@gmail.com.

Despite persistent attempts by confused users or online sign-ups trying to claim or force me off the handle over the last 20+ years, that address remains my private property. However, its role is officially changing:

1. cole.cooper@gmail.com will strictly serve as a private, secured personal address—completely detached from blog operations, social media registrations, and reader contact forms.

2. thesundayjournalist@gmail.com will host all official publishing operations, newsletter delivery, and professional correspondence.

3. Mark Coleman will be the unified author handle across all published columns, Substack feeds, and editorial projects.

4. Coleman Mark Cooper (My real name) - will still show up in profiles associated with cole.cooper@gmail.com.  That will remain for my personal profile on social media sites such as LinkedIN.

Fitting Into the “Single Pane of Glass” Workflow

This email cleanup isn’t happening in a vacuum. It is the final piece of the digital overhaul designed to streamline production across Cole’s Notes and The View from the Plateau Substack.

Two Decades of “A Googley E-mail Issue”

To understand why this move is happening now, we have to look back to October 6, 2004.

Back when Gmail was still in its exclusive invitation-only beta stage, I transitioned from my old Hotmail (Obandrinker@hotmail.com) and Shaw home internet accounts to register cole.cooper@gmail.com. At the time, “Cole Cooper” was a relatively rare name on the web.

The Gmail Dot-Insensitivity Dilemma:
  cole.cooper@gmail.com  ──┐
  colecooper@gmail.com   ──┼──>  ALL deliver to the same inbox!
  colecoop@gmail.com     ──┘

Because of Google’s internal routing rules, Gmail ignores periods in username addresses. That meant all three variants above landed in my inbox. Over the past two decades, as more Cole Coopers joined the internet—from Twitter football players (@coopball) to fictional Marvel characters at the Daily Bugle—my inbox gradually became a landing pad for mail intended for complete strangers.

While having a common name online is harmless, the real problem began when third-party businesses and individuals repeatedly typed the wrong email address.

Notable Inbox Cross-Confections Over the Years:

• Financial & Privacy Risks: Receiving confidential account setup and sign-in instructions for an Allstate insurance account in the United States because the sender omitted an “88” from the intended recipient’s address.

• Tax & Charitable Receipts: Receiving official church donation tax receipts from Mill Woods Assembly intended for a local parishioner.

• School Homework: Receiving student portals, school registrations, and assignment notifications from students who mistyped their school contact emails.

While I have always done the honest thing—calling insurance providers, notifying pastors, and telling students I won’t do their homework—it highlighted a glaring flaw: using a personal, dot-insensitive legacy Gmail address for public publishing is a privacy vector and an organizational nightmare.

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What You Need to Do as a Reader

If you correspond with me, subscribe to the blog, or feature my work, please update your contact records:

• Update your address books to use my new domain emails under thesundayjournalist@gmail.com.

• Direct all editorial inquiries, story tips, and newsletter responses to the new domain address.

• Adjust your spam filters to whitelist emails originating from thesundayjournalist@gmail.com.

Thank you for being part of this journey as we step out of the legacy Gmail noise and into a cleaner, more professional era of independent journalism.