I think I am a relatively tech savvy person. I use Gmail but had to use a string of three random numbers after my name because it was taken. One of my co-workers said today: “Seriously, that’s your email? Are you in high school?” He was referring to the numbers. Is this a common held belief? I can understand having a stupid name like cheeseface235@gmail but yourname123@gmail is considered ‘high school’? What am I supposed to do if my name is taken then?
Your friend sounds like a loser who needs to get a life, frankly. How is numbers in your name “high school?”
No, it’s not a common belief and as you say often necessary/practical due to your name being taken. I think sitting there trying to come up with some cutesy name vs just using your first name and some numbers is “high school,” if anything.
There was a thread here, sorta recently, about how to go about getting a better email address when your name is taken.
On a slight side-note, when I did fraud prevention at a website, one of the ‘flags’ was an email account that used an actual name. This was, oh…almost 10 years ago, but apparantly that was considered ‘trying too hard and must be fake’.
I never did understand that one.
Eh, I think numbers after a name is a little bit… uh, declasse. Perhaps it recalls visions of AOL screen names.
But to have a weird name and several numbers (like “Rolanda Everready 234” or “Taylur Roofshingle 047”) is ample cause for nobody to read your emails, ever. Even if you are on peoples’ “not spam” list.
I have three sons with the same first initial as mine, which often leads to at least one of us having numbers in his login or yahoo address.
Personally, I have never had any problems getting my email address to match ‘Gagundathar The Inexplicable’ even though it is a very common name in my home culture. I have often wondered about this and once went so far as to add numbers to it just to fit in. But, there was a tragic buffer overflow when I tried Gagundathar271828The314159Inexplicable. Please don’t hate me.
If you’re using it with the latest number you run a higher risk of your email going to someone else maybe?
As in if you’re X64 and theres an X63, X65, X54, X74…
Otara
Its made my life much simpler 
Best thing since I decided not to get on Facebook. Nobody ever bothers me with emails.
? I was issued firstinitiallastname251@ISP.com and never bothered changing it, I use it as a spamcatcher for filling out forms. Nobody has ever bothered me about it in like 17 years.
I don’t personally want numbers in my email address, and avoid them, but that’s my own preference, not a rule that others need to follow. I doubt most people care.
Yeah, I really never understood that filter. But when I was hired there, it was as part a new group of people who were to manually go through suspicious postings and manually verify they were real people with real items for sale using real credit cards, not shills using stolen credit cards to con people.
The ‘real name is a flag’ thing, again, just made no sense. After about 6 months, when we’d completed the job we were hired for <which was to get said company through the 6-month probation a major credit card company had put our company on due to too many flagged and fake credit cards coming through the site> we had some great programmers put together an automated system, based on the info we’d learned during said probation. I can’t see any reason why they would have included the whole ‘real name is fake’ thing in the automated version; it never helped us once, manually.
My real name is so darned common I can never have an email address using it without numbers. I’m truly shocked that my company benefits login allows it, because that is the first site I have ever been able to use just firstinitiallastname at. I enter a lot of email addresses all day long, and most all of the that have real names in them use numbers, unless they are for company-specific email or gmail.
I think it gives off a slightly less professional look, unless the numbers are meaningful. Like the year you started the company, or something. It’d be better to use initials of your job title, or your middle initial, or an underscore or periods.
[EMAIL=“yourname123@gmail.com”]yourname123@gmail.com has alternatives, you could certainly come up with something better. Say your name is Joseph Alan Schmidt:
[EMAIL=“josephalanschmidt@gmail.com”]josephalanschmidt@gmail.com
[EMAIL=“joealanschmidt@gmail.com”]joealanschmidt@gmail.com
[EMAIL=“joe.alan.schmidt@gmail.com”]joe.alan.schmidt@gmail.com
[EMAIL=“joe_alan_schmidt@gmail.com”]joe_alan_schmidt@gmail.com
[EMAIL=“joeschmidt@gmail.com”]joeschmidt@gmail.com
[EMAIL=“jaschmidt@gmail.com”]jaschmidt@gmail.com
[EMAIL=“j.a.schmidt@gmail.com”]j.a.schmidt@gmail.com
[EMAIL=“j_a_schmidt@gmail.com”]j_a_schmidt@gmail.com[EMAIL=“joeschmidt@gmail.com”]
[EMAIL=“joe.a.schmidt@gmail.com”]joe.a.schmidt@gmail.com
[EMAIL=“joseph.a.schmidt.jas@gmail.com”]joseph.a.schmidt.jas@gmail.com
Although if your last name is super, super common (like Garcia or Smith) then it’d be understandable you *have *to use numbers.
I knew someone who’s email adress ended in a number. But that wasn’t the bad part. The bad part was a litteral slang translation of it was “mother who gives blow jobs”. Not the best thing to put on a resume and job application…but maybe thats just me. Then again that might be the thing to clinch the job…
Another thing is for personal (ie unsecure) email, I don’t WANT my real name in there.
The coworker was really rude, but to me, yeah, that doesn’t look professional. I mean, that’s like “not wearing a tie”, some places it matters and some places it doesn’t. I’m used to computer jobs where most usually someone has an organisational email address from their old university, their job, some small ISP they happen to know, a domain name they registered themself, etc, etc. I know lots of people with (to me) silly email addresses are perfectly sensible, so it shouldn’t make a difference, but to me it’s like wearing a tie: you don’t care if you see a coworker outside of a work context and find they have a silly email address and a T-Shirt, but it’s a bit weird if that’s what they wear to a job interview.
ETA: FWIW, I would still have the same reaction against a yahoo email address, or using facebook rather than email, etc, etc. To me, gmail is only barely acceptible as a “real” email address (I use it but redirect email there). But I realise that, in fact, lots of people have no reason to keep to those standards
? Did I miss something? This is a personal email address, not a work one.
The less numbers the better, but your coworker is making a big deal out of nothing.
I don’t know about other email providers, but Gmail ignores full stops (periods) in usernames. joealanschmidt is the same username as joe.alan.schmidt or joealan.schmidt, etc. So some of those are out.
Also I would tend to avoid underscores, as lots of people seem to have real trouble figuring out how to type them, or knowing what the character is called if you have to give your address over the phone. Also, when written they can get confused with hyphens.
Luckily, I was able to get firstname.surname@gmail.com - and I regularly get email intended for other people of the same name who didn’t manage to bag it it. (Most recently sign-up info for a soccer team in Canada, monthly wages summary for a small business in Australia, and a random photo of some girl and her dog, saying hi to their family.)
I’d be screwed by that system, as my e-mail address is with my domain, which is myrealname.com I have my own domain and run two websites (one is my name, another is not, both are photography related). It makes it really easy for people to remember, so it’s nice. Since I own my own domain and such, I also have 3 or 4 different e-mails (that I will use mainly as a junk collection filter or some other such stuff) as well as a gmail account that has nothing to do with my real name.