GAH! Email naming conventions are driving me MAD!

What moronic management clusterfuck decided that THIS was a good idea?! Rather than having one standard email naming convention for all the different email boxes, this idiotic company I work for has decided to have about 37 of them. Just the most common addresses I use have as their naming conventions:

Bankcard
Bankcard-
Bankcard -
BCS
BCS-
BCS -
BC
BC-
BC -

With each dash and space combination leading to a completely separate division of the email address system. They’re not uniform across divisions or even within departments. It’s next to impossible to remember what term goes with what mailbox and even if I could remember that, say, Acct Processing is BCS it’s completely impossible to keep it straight whether there’s no dash, a dash or a space and dash. None of which would be a problem at all if I could just set up a personal mailbox so that I could list my frequently used addresses in it but the damn company doesn’t allow that option. I waste so much time dicking around trying to find the right address. Yargh! Stupid! Bad email!

This is a prime example of why decentralizing a function like IT is a bad idea.

? Please, elaborate.

Why don’t they simply set up a bunch of aliases so that no matter which convention is used, the mail gets to the right individual.

It’s standard practice to do this at my company. When a new employee starts, they get:

joeblow@mycompany.com
jblow@mycompany.com
joe@mycompany.com
blow@mycompany.com

and any potential misspellings we can think of off the top of our heads.

Because they are fucking stupid, that’s why.

In my experience in the corporate world, often some genius on the top floor of HQ will decide that they can save money if they take a department like IT and instead of having one big place that does everything they break it up into a bunch of smaller offices all over the place. This could let each office decide how they’d like things like email addresses to be done, leaving people like Otto to deal with it.

All that probably only makes sense in my own head.

Not in the same league, but still. It so happens that my RL first name is Dan, and my last name starts with an A.

So when I started a new job, my mail address should have been dana@<company>.co.il

So, the IT gal decides I can’t have a girl’s name as my mail address :rolleyes:, and therefore I shall henceforth be known as danab@<company>.co.il – ensuring that anyone who doesn’t know any better would assume that there’s a woman named Dana Berkowitz (or something) at that address… :smack:

Luckily it was a small operation, so other than getting to laugh about it with co-workers (and getting to bust her chops a bit for this, all in good humor), no misunderstandings ensued. But the handle stuck, to the point that it’s what I actually ask for when I switch to a new job or get a userid for a new system…

Ugh, no fucking shit! In moves where the company is “going forward” (I hate that fucking phrase) in customer satisfaction, shit like this is introduced to “better focus” on “guestomers”. ( I swear to Christ “guestomer” was the legitimate word.)

I used to work for Amazon.com. Here’s the nightmare system in place.

There are ~10 people to a “team”. (Working myself up to a seperate rant here, sorry.) The team includes 2 “Leads” and an “Area Manager”. The team has it’s own email queue. The Leads and AM have a queue and the AM has a queue. In my office there were 12 teams. That’s 36 queues right there. And we were on the top floor.

Below us were those that handled “contacts” for tools and high-end electronics, like plasma TVs. If a referral was warranted, there was a queue for each product including, but not limited to, big screen TVs, shop tools, lawn and garden equipment (snowblowers, lawnmowers, etc.), major appliances and so on.

Then there was “Seller support”. These could be divided mainly between Merchant sellers and Marketplace sellers. Further breakdowns of queues within those are too numerous to list.

Then there are the cell phone issues. My office exclusively handled those. There’s T-Mobile, Virgin, Sprint, Verizon, Cingular, Tracfone. Each provider had a queue. Each of those queues were divided into phones, SIM cards, lost/stolen phones, contracts, rebates, accessories, replacements, etc. (The joke is that anyone with access to one queue has access to all queues. Should have just been one and streamlined it. But that would make sense I guess. Can’t have that! :rolleyes: )

And all that was just in my office. There are offices in ~20 locations worldwide. Each with other specialty queues, teams, and so on.

The best part is in the search feature of Outlook, the queues aren’t updated regularly. There are queues you only know about if you’re told about them. That’s efficient.

And if it is a listed queue, you damn well better hope to know where the hyphens, dots and underscores are.

Come to think of it, I don’t really miss the job so much. If I wasn’t wasting time finding e-mail addresses, I was dealing with people that just didn’t understand that it wasn’t my fault UPS lost their package.

Our convention here is first initial, full last name @ company name . com.

So, of course we have two people who’d end up with the same email address under that convention. At other companies I’ve worked at, that meant that one of them had to be full first name, full last name @ company name . com.

Nope. Not here. They made the other one iname1@company.com

Like anyone is going to make that logical assumption…

:smack: Stoopid stoopid stoopid.

Just to clarify, for individuals the convention is firstname.lastname@company.com and that works just fine. What’s driving me batty is when I have to send email to a departmental or unit mail box. There’s no excuse for not having one standard across a department. I don’t care what standard they use, but pick one and stick with it.

It could be worse.

I have an uncommon first name with an even more uncommon spelling, and a surname that is almost unique.

In my organization of many thousands of people, I am the only one with this name. In fact, in my nation of millions of people, or even my continent, or even (dare I say it) the world, there is a good possibility that I am the ONLY person who has this name and spells it this way.

My e-mail address?

Firstname.lastname1@company.com

Because when I switched jobs, instead of switching my profile they made me a new one, saw that the name was taken already, and stuck a 1 on the end. And deleted the old one.

Maroons.

You mean, you switched jobs within the same company?

Your request either got assigned to an idjit, or somone that’s afraid of doing a re-acl. I’m inclined to think indjit.

As for the firstname.lastname2@wherever bit, Exchange does that all on its own automaticness.

Regarding setting up aliases, sure, Exchange makes that easy. It’s just how much effort the admins want to give. Also depends on how many users you have. At any given time, we have upwards of 200,000 humans here, so we don’t have a whole lot of time to devote to dreaming up likely fat-fingerings of people’s names.