From: Steve Jobs. "Great idea, thank you."

They must have learned from your experience. When we were acquired by HPE they did not let us choose and our director of engineering got an email address that misspelled his name... fixing it involved him being locked out of all systems while the people trying to fix it emailed someone else with a similar name about it. His advice for other team members in the same spot was "if you don't like your email address, do not attempt to fix it."

HPE was truly a trip. I paid $2000 to be able to disparage them online and it was worth every penny.

In the late 90s I worked for a now defunct Australian electronics retailer, who were also a well-known AS/400 shop. Our stock reports etc would come via email from qsecofr@<domain>.com.au.

The QSECOFR (Security Officer) user is effectively root on OS/400.

I would've thought they would run these jobs as some other user, but apparently not.

this reminds me when I was at a course from a big software company in the late 90s, and we had problems setting up the system at first because some executive in Germany had named his machine localhost.

I’m confused why cron jobs would be sending emails to root@hpe.com?

Or something like "ab-production@company.com", where ab is whatever a mage system.

I did something very similar, but the effects were different - people who intended to send mail to other people with my first name had my new distribution list (I created a distribution list with myname@company.com with myself as the only member) pop up as the first thing in their autocomplete.

I started to receive mail across the entire company for people who typed "myname<TAB>".

I deleted the distribution list a few minutes later.

A colleague had an email when they started that was very similar to an SVP. When they highlighted the confusion, it got fixed promptly.

$$$$$

[flagged]

I was mikel@apple.com for about a decade. I never got misdirected mail, probably because there aren’t all that many people with the first name "Mikel." The only other one I personally know of is Mikel Bancroft, who works at Franz, inc.

I had mark@apple.com during my time there, accidentally got added to one of the exec’s threads from Tim and felt pretty silly (and didn’t read anything in that thread, couldn’t delete it fast enough, had to email Tim to explain)

i nabbed complaints@apple.com for a while. that was pretty scarring actually.

I managed to claim my 4-letter-first-name@apple.com. Not having an English name definitely helps.

I first learned about the ability to apply for custom aliases at my university after noticing a guy I knew didn't have the usual pattern — first 5 of last name, first name initial, and nothing or else numbers 2+ depending upon your order in line. So I was 'millej3'.

Then I thought about the guy's name: D___ Hoover.

He had applied for, and got, 'hoover'.

s(teve)2@next.com

Heh. I have a somewhat related story.

In the market we sell into, mergers, acquisitions and spin-outs are the norm. People shift employers all the time without changing offices. It's a whole Thing.

USUALLY this is somewhat drama-free, and USUALLY there's not an issue with email addresses, but this is not a story about the usual case.

Most places now seem to use the firstname.lastname@corp.com style of address. This is a good idea, and creates collisions less often than flastname@ style addresses would. However, one of my customers -- someone who had been happily a first.last@companyA.com user -- got acquired by an org that insisted on the old style flast@companyB.com addresses.

I will not provide the name of my customer, but the problem that ensued was of the same type, and yet a bit more severe, than it would have been if his name were "Steve Hithead."

To this day, though, his address honors the local convention. STANDARDS MUST BE FOLLOWED NO MATTER WHAT, apparently.

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