email naming conventions

[dee001]

Hello, one of my customers keeps running into naming problems with emails their email structure is first initial, last name but we keep running into ajohnson 's lol is there a standard or better way I should advise them on this? We were thinking of adding a number behind the last name but this leaves a little room for error. Any recommendations

 

[britechguy]

There is no ultimate solution to this, as there are just too many people sharing the same surnames along with any given name.

Numbering is one solution, another is attaching a short, hyphenated "code" identifying department, e.g., ajohnson-IT or ajohnson-HR, or similar. A third is including middle name initials for the general structure surname, first name initial, middle name initial (or flipped such that the first and middle initials come before the surname).

But in the end, this is not a problem that's going to be solved by other than workarounds, and the bigger the organization, the more "ajohnson"s you're likely to have or even "bgnewman"s or "newmanbg"s.

 

[Metanis]

Plug this question into ChatGPT or CoPilot and it will give you a lot of options.

Really large organizations use a unique identifier number (think employee ID or student ID) and then just alias the actual user's name.

When I worked at a large insurance company with over 50k employees it was nice having the unique ID because then we didn't have to worry about name changes due to marriages or divorces. We used the same ID for our Active Directory login too. We prefixed the user ID with letters to designate if someone was a "N"ormal user or "A"dministrative user. IT people usually had both a normal and an admin user account to maintain best security best practices, but the mail was routed through the "N" account.

As I recall my normal account was N0084940 and I believe they were just assigned sequentially as HR onboarded new employees.

 

[britechguy]

Really large organizations use a unique identifier number (think employee ID or student ID) and then just alias the actual user's name.

How I would have hated that! I have no problem with attaching a unique identifier number, but want some "human recognizable name" attached to an email address.

When I was working at AT&T (and they don't come bigger, really) we still used surname and first two initials when that was unique and added digits when necessary.

 

[HCHTech]

Really large organizations use a unique identifier number (think employee ID or student ID) and then just alias the actual user's name.

I hadn't thought of this option, but wouldn't you just run into the very same problem since no two people could have matching aliases? This is just moving the problem, not solving it.

 

[DRPCNZ]

We prefixed the user ID with letters to designate if someone was a "N"ormal user or "A"dministrative user.

Ah the good old kNuckle head and Advanced kNuckle head. I use the same namimg convention and when I was asked what the N and A stood for that was the answer I gave them

 

[Metanis]

I hadn't thought of this option, but wouldn't you just run into the very same problem since no two people could have matching aliases? This is just moving the problem, not solving it.

Changing aliases is much less traumatic than changing actual IDs. Changing IDs can be a pain when you have a bunch of custom security groupings you need to duplicate.

Also, I think in addition to using more initials I would go with department and/or location and/or paygrade suffixes.

 

[YeOldeStonecat]

For that second user...I'll add their middle initial. I don't recall ever having to go beyond that.

 

[Diggs]

One thing I've found is capitalization sometimes makes a difference and sometimes doesn't. Diggs@Gmail.com is different from diggs@gmail.com only on some email systems. From what I can tell it has to do with if the system is running Linux or Windows but I don't know that for sure.

 

[britechguy]

@Diggs:

As far as Google is concerned, capitalization and punctuation are irrelevant. Both of the addresses you gave would resolve to the same address on Google's side, as would D.iggs@gmail.com or Digg.s@gmail.com. I just tried multiple variants with inserted dots, which I knew were ignored, and combinations of uppercase/lowercase in the pre at sign and gmail.com side of another Gmail address I have. All variants make it through.

 

[Diggs]

I used Gmail as an example but I've never had problems with their servers, it's some of the lessor known email servers that have had the hiccup.

 

[YeOldeStonecat]

The vast majority of modern email servers are no longer case sensitive. However, looking up old RFCs....email addresses "were" case sensitive back in the early days. I very vaguely remember a very small, specialized local ISP that ran a crap operation....his email server was some open source *nix product...I forget the name, maybe Horde or something like that...eh...probably way before that....anyways...it WAS case sensitive, as were some other *nix based mail servers back then. It was not the rarest thing in the early days.

Wouldn't make sense for email servers to be case sensitive....some people always type with their cap locks on...imagine the lack of reliability there when sending email!

Linux is case sensitive in both login username as well as passwords.
Windows is not case sensitive with login names...but it is with passwords.

 

[Blues]

I'm not old nor am I young at this point but I don't ever remember case sensitive emails so this is actually interesting news to me.