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Comment by makeitdouble | Hacker News Reader

Would addressing you by your mail address work ?

Handling people's name is I think the bane of our field, and leads to many of the awful choices like forcing fields with a first and last name for instance, or requesting people's gender to properly set the Mr and Mrs. As a dev I'm not happy about it, as a user I hate it, I'm not sure the majority of people are happy either with the current state of things.

Accepting that it's a machine sending the mail could simplify all of this quite a bit, provided people are fine by being addressed in an impersonal and inorganic way.

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If you mean snail mail address, no it wouldn't. It's common to share these between people who have the same last (or sometimes first) names. Things get really fun when it's. both, e.g. a man marrying somebody who has the same first name as their sister. This actually happened in my (distant) family.

If you mean an email (or the part before the @), also no. People sometimes sign up from addresses like contact@example.com, and "dear contact" would be super confusing.

The "right thing to do" is to have a "what should we call you" field, which should be completely separate from any names collected for legal purposes, if any.

> If you mean an email (or the part before the @), also no. People sometimes sign up from addresses like contact@example.com, and "dear contact" would be super confusing.

I was going for the principle that we're not trying to mimic human emotions when it's a mail to remind you to accept the latest TOS.

So, no "Dear", no trying to come up with something socially acceptable, just plain "miki123211@hn.xx, please review our newest Terms and Services at https://....../...."

The "what should we call you" field sounds attractive, but would be ripe for abuse IMHO. Not on technical terms, but users would definitely play with it to have you send "Mrs DeepshitFuckHorse please confirm your email at...." to random addresses for instance, or any other vector that we're not thinking about right now.

Earlier everything was based on 'handles' and using them was fine and expected.. As networks adopt everyone and become used for formal things it's gotten more complicated to integrate rules of different systems.

I've started to prefer messages that just start with "Hello,".

This is already plenty common with names.

I tend to use fuck/off as name/surname for completely throwaway accounts, and "dear mr. Fuck" is something I received once.

When I was in university, a friend of mine used to address me by my unix username.

Only one?

You got off light. I had a good number of people call me by my username at my undergrad.

When I went to grad school, they let us select user ids. My user name matched my first name, most elegant solution to that problem yet ;)

This rules and your friend is awesome

It's not unusual for people to use the name they know you by. In high school, there was someone who addressed me as Ix, the name I used in multiplayer Duke Nukem. He didn't know my name.

There are several people I know primarily through wechat, where it's almost always unnecessary to address people by name because messages have only one recipient. Sometimes this has led to conversations like this:

> What should I call you? 颖？

> OK.

[I was not especially reassured by that response.]

> re was someone who addressed me as Ix, the name I used in multiplayer Duke Nukem

Heh, there are still some people who call me by my nickname back from 2000s. It doesn't help what it means something between "the beast" and "the thing" and I had people of the old clout be quite offended by it. Including my mother.

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