Apologies, folks. I’m just a fusser, and they’re nice folks.
No problem! I’m sure it wouldn’t be a big deal with nice folks if you did decide to bring it up, either.
But personally, I have a pretty ironclad rule that in professional/workplace contexts I never initiate any conversation directly relating to any sexual topic unless it’s specifically relevant to a work issue that you can do something about. So something like “I feel pretty strongly that we should not use email handles that abbreviate our firm’s name First Advantage Property Managers as FAPManagers, because of the unintended connotations of the slang term ‘fap’” would be fine.
Something like “Hey, have you people at a different company noticed that your established email address ‘fapportrait’ sounds like it’s referring to the slang term ‘fap’?” is not fine, because it’s unhelpful kibitzing of an earlier communications-and-marketing decision that’s already out there in the world.
Or mangetout.
In my job I see a lot of e-mail addresses and user IDs, which comes from the e-mail address. I see John Smith as JOHSMITH as much as John.
Sometimes they make real words, like S. Hines. For some new people I know that they will get their e-mail changed. And I see times where the they probably changed it. Like SAMHART likely had a e-mail address change. (I will need to check to see if there really is a S. Hart)
I’m familiar with a family with the last name of Untermeyer. At least two of the children have first names that start with “C.” I’d like to think that I would have foreseen the potential for issues.
I really wonder about the companies that want to create some short email address nickname. This isn’t 1995; email addresses are not limited to 8 characters and never were. At least not once you got outside e.g. AOL’s walled garden.
My last employer had a simple system: firstname.lastname@company.com. I don’t know how they disambiguated the several e.g. John Smith’s who must have existed across the 100K+ employees; I never encountered anyone whose email address deviated from that pattern.
They also created an alias for each email address which was employeenumber@company.com. Which was guaranteed unique over all time. Even now as a retiree I’m known to them by my employee number. I actually expect the employee number is the “real” email address and the first.last address is an alias. That facilitates the inevitable name changes.
Probably a serial number at the end.
My current employer (a school) uses first initial lastname for employees, and first initial lastname followed by two-digit graduation year for students. I do know of one case where the year was the only thing disambiguating a student from a staff member; we all had to be careful not to just autocomplete when sending things to that staff member. We also currently have a pair of twins with the same initial (and really similar names overall); I’d have to check to see how that’s handled (though we’re a small enough school that it’s not hard to handle special cases).
Computer Associates (at least) used to use first three of last name, first two of first, two-digit serial. When they acquired us and assigned ours, I immediately wondered what they’d do with Kyle Fucks or Tyrone Shim. My guess: nothing, “Deal with it”.
Mine was SMIPH03, which, as you can guess from my handle here, quite delighted me. The highest serial I saw was BERMA16, presumably from all the Mark Bergmanns and the like out there on Lon Guyland.
A Large Automobile Manufacturer in Dearborn (ahem) uses first initial, first six of lastname, two-digit serial. When I did work for them I was PSMITH87; a friend was TSMITH99. I finally asked what the next T SMITH got: TSMIT100. They did have a Walter Rong, and his ID was WRONG1. Classic!
“never were”–per the RFCs, yes, but in reality, not so much. In the 1990s, the prevailing corporate email system was IBM PROFS, which ran on IBM VM (mainframes), where userids are limited to eight characters. That legacy has remained in many companies, even those who were never particularly mainframe-oriented.
And don’t get me started on case sensitivity in the username portion (the part left of the @), which is technically allowed but, hopefully, never implemented that way!
ETA: Yes, I saw that you noted that AOL had this limit. My point is that de facto it WAS a limit, just as case insensitivity is a de facto requirement.
That’s how my community college district does it. firstname.lastname#@college.edu
There are tens of thousands of students and employees, in a constant state of flux. It’s more common to see an email address with a number after the name, than without.
The first place that I worked used PROFS! We could choose anything we wanted so long as it was between three and eight letters, wasn’t offensive and wasn’t already taken. Some people were whimsical but I can’t remember any off the top of my head.
My Username is completely worthless on dating sites. Or maybe I’m just ugly. 
At work the e-mail addresses are assigned like below. This is if people are hired in this order.
John Smith - JSMITH
Janice Smith - JASMITH
James Smith - JAMSMITH
If there are more James Smith, it would be JAMESMITH, JAMESSMITH, JAMESSMITH2, JAMESSMITH3, etc.
But the person getting JAMESMITH could easily request a different e-mail address because it’s confusing, so he woud get JAMESSMITH, and the next one gets JAMESSMITH2 and so forth.
My friend Daniel lastname because Daniela lastname (the a from his middle initial) in a similar situation.
I almost said “SMTP email”, but didn’t want to get bogged down explaining email history.
You’re surely right that before everybody accepted SMTP as the worldwide standard, several proprietary closed systems had dumb mailbox name length restrictions.
Obviously a musician or home canner.
I wrote a friend who’s a network admin. He says that the 8-character limit is still in common usage because it’s “safest” based on ancient 8.3 filename patterns. Which I can believe—that stuff dies slowly!
Nowadays most companies using Exchange (which is most companies) seem to map that 8-character network ID to something more user-friendly like Firstname.Lastname or FirstnameLastinitial or FirstinitialLastname. Though at least one I know of still exposes the network ID, which is FirstinitialLastinitialnnnn, where the nnnn is a four-digit number. Those are irritating, not very mnemonic!
When we were briefly owned by HP (a decade ago) they had an internal web page that let you set up aliases mapping your network ID to up to five aliases, which was nice, because you could claim all of the above (if not taken, doh) and also use the non-standard name of choice if desired, e.g., phs3.
Besides being “into” email, having written email gateways, I’m also sensitive to this as a Smith—every time we get bought I get some random personal email to the previous owner of my email address. I also have a Gmail address that some moron keeps specifying as his email. It’s not just his way of avoiding spam: It’s included things he definitely wants, like some training he had paid for. I know WAY more about him and his wife than I should, could probably steal their identity if I were so inclined. This has gone on for over a decade, shows no signs of any clue arriving at his end. And yes, I’ve looked him up. He’s not very visible on the web, though I know he moved from Georgia to Colorado when he retired a few years ago…
Is that still the case? It seems to me that most institutional email systems are Gmail, now.
“most”? Maybe for non-commercial? The ones we deal with almost all seem to use Exchange–I know of a couple using Gmail but not many. Lotes is very, very dead.
But now I’m’a pay more attention, look at more headers!