Brevity in email addresses is a wonderful thing.

I wonder sometimes, who thinks of these domain names that some companies have? Mine at work is simple, it’s three letters. First name dot last name @ Blah Blah Blah. In rewards for the forward thinking of whomever chooses these things I almost always get emails when they’re sent to me. The same can’t be said for some of the places I do business with. Why on earth would you choose something like:

Bob.Johnson @Hoorayforyouforchoosingourcompanytodobusinesswith.net.

Is is any wonder that you seem to never, ever get any of the emails we send out? Why on earth would someone choose such a complicated email domain name? It’s not clever, it’s not helpful, it’s not even smart. Also a lot of the fields that I can populate with your information aren’t long enough to contain this staggering work of corporate genius and it cuts off the last half of your stupid email so nobody knows where to send them or someone makes a typo in your vapor stream of letters too. What the hell people?

Dilbert’s pointy hair boss ruminating on why an employee doesn’t like her company assigned email:

“That Brenda Utthole is such a whiner…”

Mine at my last employer’s was anne.neville.nonemployee @ evilco.com(name of company changed to protect the not-so-innocent, and of course it used my real name and not my Dope name). Way to go- long and constantly reminding me of my second-class status as Contractor Scum.

Oh yeah. My work email has my first initial and last name, which is no problem, but after the @ is our company name, divided by a dash (e.g. abercrombie-fitch.com). It’s long and the dash is kind of a pain in the butt.

I have a friend whose email is the first initial of his first name, at his company name, which is 5 letters long. (“A @ bcdef” type of thing). Now that’s brevity.

I once had a remote acquaintance named Wes whose company email address policy was the user’s first name concatenated with the first letter of the user’s last name. But in his case, they decided to make an exception upon seeing westink@ company.com

Back in the day I had an account on a backbone machine (back when email addresses included routing info). Everyone would mail to me because I was easy to reach from everywhere (telemark@decvax) and then I’d reply to get the route.

I have the exact opposite problem. My company is known as XXXX YYYY. We’re often referred to as YYYY for short. My email is firstname.lastname@YYYY.com

If someone emails me at firstname.lastname.@xxxxyyyyy.com I won’t get it.

Of course www.xxxxyyyy.com redirects to our website, yyyy.com

I had a trainer back in the day who had a first name that began with S and the last name was Odom. Which of course is sodom@blah.com

To make things even funnier, her mother was a very devout christian and apparently really did not like the email address.

Slee