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Comment by bhartzer | Hacker News Reader

I own the domain of my last name. Several family members use (firstname@lastname.com).

I once went to get a new phone at Best Buy, and the employee needed my email address. I gave it to here (firstname@lastname.com) and she insisted that it was NOT my email address. She insisted that it MUST end in @gmail.com or @yahoo.com, something like that.

We frequently sign up for stuff online, and when we enter our email address it won't let us sign up... we figured it is because the email address is too similar to our actual name, the name we've entered in the 'first name' and 'last name' fields (it happens to both me and my wife at least 2-3 times a year).

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I have the same, firstname@lastname.com/uk/.co.uk/etc; my family name alone is an absolute pain in the arse for most British English speakers to spell when given it verbally; to make matters worse, when I give people my email, over the phone for example, I get the combination of "what's it @?" and then when they finally get there, that my last name is after the @, another 5 minutes to get them to spell it correctly; Some, despite this dance still end up never getting it right.

My wife constantly (half-jokingly) reminds me of how much of an PITA I've caused her with my name (that she took), when her maiden name was so sophisticated and easy compared to my weird, unidentifiable, "foreign" (I'm British/English) one.

EDIT to add: I don't often have issues with forms, but I reserve that particular address for "important" family related things, the sort of account where I _know_ if I receive an email to it, I need to read it. Everything else I use a gmail for (as does my wife).

> her maiden name was so sophisticated and easy

You could have solved the problem at the root by taking her name

There is still time for it too

Whereas I made the opposite mistake of having firstname@outlook.com

I get ungodly amounts of spam, relentlessly, from everyone. Because anyone over the age of 50 seems to give it as their email to companies like Target.

I have never had this problem and I have been using firstname@lastname.com for 20+ years

Same here

Yeah, I've had issues with firstname@lastname.name, but only with terrible regex validation logic that thinks a TLD can't be 4 characters long. And some quizzical replies from people: "dot name? Is that new?" Yeah, I say. Its pretty new.

Whatever, Tim Apple...

I use bestbuy@lastname.com with no issues. I often get customer service people who think I work for their company.

Lots of sites don't let you put their business name in the username. For instance, Samsung won't let you register with "samsung" in it.

But they will let you use sam_sung

When I first got a dot UK address a lot of forms refused to accept it, demanding that I use org.uk or co.uk instead.

It was really annoying, luckily it doesn't happen as much anymore.

I tried using the clever email equivalent to me@firstna.me only using a more obscure TLD. Most people got very confused by this.

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