Hacker News Reader

Comment by crazygringo | Hacker News Reader

The monitors, I totally understand and agree with. That's about actual productivity.

But choosing your own e-mail address? There must be a thousand little details like that in my life, every day, that I have no control over, like the color of my desk, or the sound of a coworker's voice. By all means, try to find a workplace that suits you the best, but if a seemingly tiny detail like that bothers you so much, unless company policy turns your e-mail address into something offensive, I can't help but feel you're going to have a hard time being happy anywhere.

Am I the only one who's literally never thought about their corporate e-mail address form before?

View on HN

At Google your username appears everywhere. In mail, code reviews, chat, irc - everywhere. I know some of my colleagues by their username only, I don't even remember their real names.

When we start we get to specify three usernames in order of preference. You are given the first one that is available. It means a lot to me to be adg@google.com.

do you really want your raw email available publically?

A good test of Gmail filtering abilities, I suppose.

I've been posting my e-mail addresses in plaintext all over the web for a good decade and a half. I still use those same addresses. I see no spam. Spam filters work.

Why are people afraid of having their e-mail address out there without obfuscation?

Back when Usenet and mailing lists were the medium for most of the important conversations on the internet (that is, before 1994 or 1995) if you tried to post to Usenet or a mailing list with an obfuscated email address, people would complain (in replies to your post) if the admins running Usenet or the mailing list let your post through at all.

This was enforced with various levels of strictness.

DE usenet is still pretty strict about not allowed munged email addresses, and only allowing you to use an address that you have control of.

Other bits of Usenet would tolerate carefully munged From headers, but insist on empty or real Reply-to headers. (Reply to wasn't returned in a simple header retrieval, meaning it wasn't as often scraped. And it was optional. So either have it real, or don't have it at all.) Other bits didn't care what you did.

Since poorly munged email addresses could cause considerable amounts of spam to be sent to that address it's fair enough to remind people not to inadvertently use another person's real email address.

email filters then were not great; email addresses were scraped; downloading a lot of headers over lousy dial-up was annoying; and huge mailboxes was rare.

>Other bits of Usenet would tolerate carefully munged From headers

before 1994?

No, sorry. I should have said it was later than 1994; probably around 1998.

I get a boatload of spam daily. On gmail.

Did you turn off or otherwise adjust spam filtering? Otherwise, I don't believe you.

At my last job (large, successful startup) I got the wildcard mail and got close to zero spam. Gmail spam filtering definitely works very well.

Insanely well. I've been posting publicly as dmd@3e.org for 16 years now, and at a few other addresses that forward to that for 22. All of that mail goes to gmail. My spam folder gets ~600 messages per day. I get a false-negative (spam in inbox) about once a month. I check for false-positives (ham in spambox) pretty regularly, but haven't ever found one.

I use Gmail, but I definitely get spam. I get false-positive spam all of the time (mailing lists I'm on have a decent chance of going to the spam box), and whenever a spammer has 'Google' in the email title, it has about a 60% chance of being a false-negative (i.e. showing up in the inbox). I also get false-negatives on spam when there is just a title and message body.

Perhaps Gmail's spam filters are mostly based on how you train them, so people who receive more email get a better filter?

Nope. I don't mess with it. I am using GAFYD though.

Very interesting! I wonder if spammers steer clear of @gmail.com addresses to prevent Google's algorithms from learning about their spam. (If so, they probably want to steer clear of GAFYD addresses, too, but maybe they don't know how to identify them).

yeah, spammers don't know how to make a DNS query

Who cares about how much it filters out? The question is how much false positives does it have? And google most definitely are not good enough to even be usable in that department. If you never know if you've missed something you have to constantly check the filtered mails as well, making the spam filtering much worse than nothing.

If you rely on something as blunt as gmail spam filtering you don't take emailing seriously.

Every year I get 3-5 nigerian-type spam in my gmail inbox. The most recent one use google group to deliver the spam.

I also remember reading a while back that trying to disguise your email with the "username (at) gmail (dot) com" approach is worse than just putting the raw email out there because it's not only just as easy to sniff out on the page, but you can also search for it in search engines: try searching for "at gmail dot com" vs "@gmail.com" in various search engines

edit: source: http://varenhor.st/2010/01/email-at-domain-dot-com-is-making...

Yes , interestingly enough the first assignment on the stanford NLP online course is too write an email harvester that finds those email addresses.

I don't care.

It's really not that big of a deal. More people should do it, especially constituent-friendly people.

Interesting... Considering Google+ at some point did not allow nicknames.

kind of different, considering gmail has always allowed nicknames. you'd have a point if google let you pick the name on your paycheck.

Does gmail allow general public to register usernames that are less than six characters now?

May I ask how many letters there are in your last name? Mine has nine letters, and it killed me to work somewhere that my username was "mschiral" and I had to type most of it but then stop two letters early.

It's like Shave and a Haircut without the "two bits".

> It's like Shave and a Haircut without the "two bits".

This is what makes me miss working at reddit.

I have a similar issue where most of the time 'surname+first_initial' means I end up with the last letter of my Surname being cut off. This becomes really annoying as because the email address is structured that way, my name on documents starts cropping up with the typo as well (as people will often just check the email address for the spelling)

Great example of one of the most frustrating cases I've seen. Thanks.

Where I work, your username is automatically assigned in this fashion:

First letter is U or V depending on whether you are temp or perm employee. Next 4 letters are first 4 of last name. Final two letters are first 2 of first name.

I'm vmamema

Nice to meet you

Be grateful your name's not Ashton Agincourt.

It might not be important to you, but I don't think the article is saying that it has to be. I think it's a good yardstick, though, for taking the 'temperature' of the sorts of policies and the kind of work environment you're about to be standing in if you decide to take a job.

As someone recently said to me when I asked if their e-mail address was "firstname.lastname@" -- "Please, we're still a startup; firstname@ is fine." It's a part of the corporate culture, no matter how small, and I suspect if you dig deeper you'll easily find other seemingly trivial but illustrative examples of how people think and work in a company.

In some large Silicon Valley companies, "firstname@company.com" is a badge of honor because it indicates that you were an employee back when the company was small. New employees don't receive that option at some point.

Yep, that's how it works with my employer. Typically, your email address and network ID are setup prior to your first day, which doesn't bother me much since what I got matches what I'm used to using.

Exactly jclulow -- it's a clue. Thanks for explaining.

Nowadays web email services like Gmail set the minimum standard for how email should work. You should be able to choose your email address from what's available, and also create new email addresses whenever you need them (with self service).

If the corporate email system cannot provide service that is as good, then people will start using services like Gmail instead. I see it happen all the time.

Personally I also regard it a sign of cluefulness to have an email address with very short local part. I always hated Gmail's 6-char minimum limit for usernames.

Recently I volunteered for a political campaign, and I signed in with a pen and wrote my email address on the sign-in page. It's mylastname@gmail.com. The campaign director saw this and said to me, "how were you able to get that address?" I said, "I've had Gmail since the day it was offered to the public in 2004." He said, "wow." Not a big deal to me, but email namespaces matter. I totally agree with the OP.

I have heard it many times here and elsewhere, but customized email addresses are a huge boon for having your own domain that I'm discovering.

I have one for my wife, son, and I. It makes life so easy when people ask for an email address and I say firstname@firstnamelastname.com (and my surname is really short and really common). Invariably, some think you are some sort of uber hacker because you pay $7/year for this service.

And then they try to send mail to firstnamelastname@gmail.com :) I have a similar domain and people have a shockingly hard time getting it right: "Yes, "john" AT "j" followed by my last name, dot com"

Email addresses, agreed, not so much. But one thing that annoys me where I work is our logins are of the form 'u0123456' (roughly sequentially allocated, but starting from 0100000)... and they're tied to our source control system. So you look through the commit logs, and all you can see are Unumbers - no names. Half the whiteboards in the office are covered in lookup tables of U-to-name.

It's a real downer when someone joins the company too - pretty much the first thing you have tell them is "you're a number now - everything in the company is accessed by this number". You can see in their eyes an "oh shit what have I gotten into" moment.

At one job, I used my usual email (tedu@), until the new IT director decided it wasn't corporate enough, and I got tunangst@. Within days, I started getting emails from recruiters playing guess the email based on my linkedin profile, which I had never received before.

Self-correcting problem!

I detest my corporate email name. Detest. It's chosen by formula, part drawn from part of your name, and part drawn from I have no idea. When I first started, HR got my name wrong (my name, not my email), and just assigned me a name. They made something up that let them move to the next form. Then IT applied the email name formula to my made up name.

http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/2000-08-19/

Relevant! Thanks.

A friend of mine in college had a name that would be mildly offensive and embarrassing to him if it was his first initial and last name. Having your own username/email might be something to think about and would be a rather painless perk to offer to prospective employees.

Like you said, when was the last time you thought about your email address?

Sometimes an E-mail is used on other company systems as a log-in, in whole or in part. I used to sympathize with past co-workers who had names much longer than mine, imagining them having to type "really_long_first.really_long_last@company.com" just to log into some web site.

I've also seen IT people enforce their random rules on everyone, leading to things like "rba186" as someone's actual E-mail address name instead of something meaningful.

So yes, choosing your own log-in and E-mail name would be pretty nice.

Yeah, I think the CDC does the random email thing. It seems really weird, but I guess I can only imagine how many @cdc.gov email addresses there are.

My school did your initials + 4 random digits, presumably to help prevent collisions and spam. It was pretty decent, actually, because you kind of got in the habit of chanting out a username in the same pattern, "a b c, 12, 34".

Works better than my current company, which does first initial + middle initial + 5 letters of your last name.

I've seen initials used too, which is at least a nice hint; but the case I based the example on conjured these characters essentially at random. The real kicker was that they were forced upon users in Unix environments who had been using CVS, Subversion, etc. and went from seeing useful log messages like "changed by jsmith" to aggravating ones like "changed by rjx133".

the email doesn't matter, it's the exception to policy. Setting up your email address is probably one of the first things that happens when you get hired. Being told by the boss that it's not worth 5 minutes of IT's time to make you happy is not a good tone to start off a new job with.

As an engineer, I mostly just use my corporate email for internal communications anyway, so it doesn't bother me at all (ours is first initial, last name, and I have a doozy of a last name). I agree with crazygringo that it's probably a bit of a dangerous yardstick if you're looking for a job in the non-startup world.

My email adress at my university contains the full name. But because I have 3 first names, all are included, which brings the total adress to 41 characters. I hate it.

I never really thought about it until one place actually misspelled my name and then told me I was wrong about it. That was fun to straighten out.

For many it doesn't matter, but for some it's a big deal. Either because they have a handle that is important to them, or because what the policy comes up with is unappealing (for many reasons).

My point is: if its important to your engineer, it should be important to the company.

I've gotten lastname.firstname2@... before. It was a (brief) nightmare.

These kinds of details are important though. I've been in a few work environments that were pleasant if you looked at the big picture, but unpleasant once you started adding up all the little details.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com