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Comment by chrisper | Hacker News Reader

That reminds me of American Express. My firstname is Christopher, but it seems parts of their system have a very short length limit. So when they send letters and emails, they call me "Christophe". It is spelled correctly on my card, though

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I'm also a Christopher. For the longest time, in the upper right corner of Amazon.com, there was a sign-out link that said, "Not Christ...?"

I've seen that too, "Welcome Christ..."

Heh, mine has always just been my first initial. "Welcome, R!". Also when I buy Kindle ebooks the default option is "Send to R's Kindle".

I have no idea where this info is stored as the details on my billing / shipping addresses have my correct (full) name.

A high school classmate's name was Joseph Longname, which the attendance system displayed as "LONGNAME, Jose".

Windows had this length limit all the up to and including Win8, my work login which included a 3 letter domain and backslash was too long for Windows, so they cut the last 3 letters of my name off so that I could be logged in. It's made logging in to to some work services difficult, I'm not always sure they are asking for full ID like email address, or the truncated version.

10 isn't much better if you're using a Microsoft account. My email follows the format "fmlastname@gmail.com" (and is coincidentally the exact same character count). My user directory gets shortened to "fmlas".

I also have a truncated first name thanks to Virgin Media in the UK. Mind you, the same bozos also limit password length to 8 or 10 characters, so they are generally hopeless.

I think that for letters it is to avoid names that overflow name tags

So it's better for them to send a mail to LongName LastName than to LongNameSomethingHere where the last name fell outside of the tag

And as your card shows, the full name is on the DB

Except you would expect that it's basic design to account for both very short names ("Li Pho") and reasonably long names ("Christopher Tannenbaum-Greenspan").

If your name tags don't work with slightly longer names, your name tags are broken, not the names.

OTOH these days I'm happy when receiving mail from the US if the address wasn't mutilated by converting Unicode to ASCII or using HTML escapes. Especially when ordering things to my company address, which has an ampersand in the company name and an umlaut in the city.

Your name tags are a function of the space allocated for the address on a letter (which is printed in bulk)

They're doing exactly what you mentioned in the first line, so big names are identifiable on letters with size limits for the address

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