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Comment by jasomill | Hacker News Reader

After years of people mistyping "jasonmill" for "jasomill" in my (originally university-assigned) email address, I registered jasomill.at so I could receive email as "jasomilldot", because I guess turning the simple act of giving out my email address over the phone into an Abbott and Costello routine sounded like a good idea at the time.

Oh, and you don't need special syntax to write code to be read aloud, to wit,

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Perl

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> turning the simple act of giving out my email address over the phone into an Abbott and Costello routine sounded like a good idea at the time

Hah! I've been dealing with that for a few years now -- my email is most of my username and spelling it out is fun for neither party.

I've considered getting the shortest, most phonetic-friendly email possible specifically for phone calls; something like a3gx@gmail.com but also want to self-host. It's a hassle!

I have an address specifically for that—it's just one letter and a few digits, redirecting to the main account. Works like a charm. Especially when the native alphabet in the country is not Latin and laboriously explaining which letter is which is a meme from the phone calls era. Whereas I can just call digits by the names in the local language, and everyone is familiar with hearing them.

Meanwhile, with my main-ish addresses, I've been told that they look like a random jumble of letters or a password. And once I've given one of them over the phone, took ten minutes easily—with confusion as to even how many letters are there.

With my domain name, I've been using a one-letter address for humans but have found it often confuses people; it doesn't fit the pattern they expect. So, I've been thinking of switching to domain@domain.tld, which is still obviously "special" but matches the regular pattern better (and I don't have to spell out <domain> twice).

A family member has firstname@firstnamelastname.com, which is super nice, but unfortunately my name and most variants are taken.

And Sharon still denies she wrote Black Perl. (It was Larry.)

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