I was at HBO during the AOL merger, and for a time my work email became gcanyon0264@aol.com, because AOL corporate email shared namespace with its customers, and my personal AOL account was… gcanyon@aol.com
I wonder where this ranks in the top 5 stupidest things I've ever heard. It's bad enough merging customer databases when two companies merge.
No other major ISP has ever done this that I know of. Likely because it's completely unnecessary. Who made this decision (and why weren't they fired immediately)?
Nobody. Going back to 1989 every AOL account had a screen name that was used as your login and your identity. Being an employee was just a flag on your account in the database.
In 1993 AOL launched its internet gateway that accepted something@aol.com and put it in your AOL Mail box. You could tell that someone was an AOL employee because a banner (I think it was) appeared at the top of the message telling you.
Some of the network engineering folks had real aol.net addresses, but I don't know how that was handled internally. I also think the Netscape folks eventually made enough of a stink to keep their previous email address too.
I was always wondering about that; it seemed to me that it would have been free advertising to Google if their users had to write and say @google.com all the time.
Yeah, we weren't thrilled.