Megan Bennett Finger
Central Washington UniversityMs. Finger,
Per your request, we have converted your email address to our alternate format: [Surname][Middle Initial]Last (to denote the spelled-out name)[First 2 letters of forename]. Your new email address is now [email protected] and your case is now closed.
Thank you,
CWU Support
Finger bang bang into your life!Seriously though, my experience with requesting a name change from the university IT dept. has been very positive.
I love this
“I don’t understand, that user keeps asking me to fix their email, and they’re more angry each time!”
Thank you for the arrow I would’ve never guess myself
There was an Alan Buser at my last company…yep, [email protected]. Not only did he have to live with that as his email, but he would occasionally receive reports that definitely should have gone to HR. Eventually they let us alias it to alan@company, but as far as I know when I left he was still getting anything sent to abuser@company too. He was such a nice guy too!
Reminds me of the search suggestions I’ve seen about suggested search topic:
“Jalen Hurts Fiancee”
First thought was that this Jalen person must have gone all Sean Diddy on his fiancee. Then I found out that his last name is Hurts.
I know how to fix this, just had the 3rd letter of her first name.
When I handled these, I always checked for poor taste collisions. If found, granted an immediate exception.
She would be Megan.finger@.
Fuck the old systems with hard character limits.
Firstname.lastname@address is pretty much a universal standard, why would you use anything else?
My work does first initial last name, which even internally results in tons of [email protected].
I don’t really get why I can’t just choose from a list of accepted combinations or something.
This is just supposition but I presume the resmasoning is they want to programatically “calculate” your email address.
I mean that’s a dumb constraint but it does explain the requirement.
They are probably just trying to keep consistency between an AD instance and Exchange or something like that. Or just laziness.
When we generate new user accounts we run a script that generates an email (so we don’t have to manually do it). It gets generated with the username of the individual which in our case would be first initial, last name. Then another alias gets generates to [email protected] and is set as primary. While the [email protected] is left as an alias, but would still technically work if you emailed it.
If a username already exists we will use the first and second letter of the first name and then the last name, etc.
In the above I mentioned consistency and laziness, but there is also another side, and that is your user base. If you are servicing hundreds of thousands of people or just a ton in general, consistency is very much preferred. Try having to explain to an end user that their login is simply “username” for their computer, but their email is “[email protected]” oh and let’s go ahead and loop in Azure SSO so now their software license login and login for all these other portals is “[email protected]”.
You end up with a mass of confusion. Sometimes simplicity is best when it’s possible.
You’d think that every place should do this, but for whatever reason a lot of them do weird shit like in the OP. Not sure why that is. Maybe they are afraid of the characters running too long or something like that for people with long names?
Edit: Wow just reading through some of the real generated emails in this post is wild lol!!
This scheme makes almost every username sound awful. They new what they were doing.
My wife’s name sounds like Annette Alonso (not her real name - this one is made up) , and her new employer had standardised emails the first two letters from the first name and the first two letters from last name. You bet she was furious with [email protected], given that she was going to be working with clients. She ultimately got it changed to [email protected]
I think “[email protected]” is pretty unique and easy to remember.
- Best Regards, Tiriakos Tsoprano
Reminds me of Education Queensland’s approach to creating usernames. First letter of the first name, first four letters of the surname. Followed by a sequential number.
I nearly lost it when I saw a staff member by the name of something like Sharon Laverton (names slightly anonymised, but odds are someone else by that name exists) have an email that not only started
slave, but also ended with a number for that final dehumanising touch.[email protected].As Nikita Grigorev, I was given an allcaps username made out of first two letters of my name and two letters of surname. I complained, but I was told that the process is a process. They changed for the ANAL guy before, but not for me. So I was called basically a slur for two years
Worked at a company where emails were first initial then last name. So there was a guy named Shawn Lutz so his email was [email protected]
It seemed I was the only one really aware of that since he almost never sent emails
We had a slutski here, too 😂
Best one I got is c. ries, [email protected] lol
I had a P. Hart who was stuck with phart@company
RIP her inbox.
Wow, the kid named finger
It even tells people where they can do it!
Gosh, I would have never figured this out without the giant useless red line!
