The One-Name Email, a Silicon Valley Status Symbol, Is Wreaking Havoc

&gt; Mr. Pham had fired off the email to a first-name-only address at Snap, assuming it was the company’s No. 2 executive.<p>So some people try to <i>guess</i> email-addresses of other people and sometimes the emails end up in the wrong place?<p>And this is news?

Parents: If you want to help your kids acquire prestigious email addresses, don&#x27;t give them a relatively common name like &quot;Peter&quot;!<p>On the other hand, I have (first initial)(surname)@gmail.com and you wouldn&#x27;t believe how many misdirected messages I get for people with the same initial and surname as me...

First, having a &quot;one name email&quot; is a needlessly complication and a narcissism certificate. No, you&#x27;re not the only Peter&#x2F;Steve&#x2F;Michael&#x2F;John&#x2F;Anne&#x2F;Carol in this company. Even if you just started. Deal with it.<p>If your name is rare enough that&#x27;s fine, but it&#x27;s better to keep to a pattern. Also use aliases (billing@, legal@, etc).

I have a first.last gmail address. I have gotten a few dozen emails intended for others, notably including legal papers for a divorce.<p>One thing I learned from getting other people&#x27;s emails is that some websites let you pay for things without email confirmation, but require you to receive the email to access it. Nexon game points or something? I tried to report the screwup, but the site wouldn&#x27;t let you contact them without a login.

RPI gave out usernames using the first five letters of the last name and the first initial. The result was, I, a lowly undergrad, got hughes@rpi.edu and a professor named Greg Hughes, who was around long before me, had hugheg@rpi.edu. That was funny. All I got out of it were a few emails from students in his classes.

One-name is lame. Long live 3 initials!

When C-Cube Microsystems was acquired by LSI Logic, we all got to keep our e-mail addresses. Early C-Cube employees had first&#x2F;last name initials as addresses. I ended up with re@lsil.com, which is a pretty sweet e-mail address.<p>Later, when Abhi Talwalker became CEO, all e-mail addresses were changed to firstname.lastname@lsil.com. My manager was pretty unhappy because his last name was Van Den Crommenacker.

Even though I&#x27;ve been using my own domains for my email for nearly the past 20 years, so can use whatever local part I want, I long ago switched to using &quot;firstname.lastname@&quot; instead of &quot;firstname@&quot;. And that was just to prevent dictionary attacks. Luckily my surname is not that common, which helps.<p>I don&#x27;t think I&#x27;ve ever received any email intended for somebody else.

In grad school, my university let us choose our own email aliases. So I had nick@utk.edu and nick@tennessee.edu for a while. That was pretty nice. And since there was no limit on aliases, I also grabbed admin@utk.edu. That one backfired because I started getting some official looking things I probably shouldn&#x27;t have, so I released that address back into the pool.

Hot take: assign everyone the address that&#x27;s the SHA256 of the first and last names. That&#x27;s the only way that&#x27;s fair, right?

Having predictable email addresses of a set format is both a boon and a bane.<p>It&#x27;s a great way to ensure that you get a bunch of spam from random people looking for jobs etc. landing in your inbox after guessing your email address.

I find the only real status symbol is a three-letter email name, though only if you&#x27;re on a big provider or some other big email system.<p>For company mail just use something unique, nobody cares.

Having one-name emails is fine until about 5 people. It&#x27;s a startup, it&#x27;s fun. After that, grow up, you&#x27;re a company, get a real email policy.

So basically people make weird assumptions or take wild guesses about an email address and havoc ensues.

&gt; He couldn’t get the email at Science, the tech incubator, because it was already taken by another Peter, who had co-founded the firm, Peter Pham. Mr. Pham had previously tried to get colleagues at the incubator to call Mr. Szabo by his last name to secure his status as The Peter of Peter@science-inc.com.<p>I puked in my mouth a bit when I read this.

What a dramatic article over something so silly. WSJ has really gone downhill.

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