When I worked for my university's Student Computing department, usernames were all "up to 7 characters from surname + the first letter of their given name." So there were plenty of stories about bad usernames that the admins would have to fix.

The best one for me, personally, was when I helped a student out whose surname was Takashi and his first name started with a T.

It didn't help that no one at Oregon State considered the 'www' when they chose the school's first domain name. So that turned into [email protected]

Edit to add: This was in the mid-90s. That was that guy's first and (at the time) only email address.

Wow, the kid named finger

Reminds me of Education Queensland's approach to creating usernames. First letter of the first name, first four letters of the surname. Followed by a sequential number.

I nearly lost it when I saw a staff member by the name of something like Sharon Laverton (names slightly anonymised, but odds are someone else by that name exists) have an email that not only started slave, but also ended with a number for that final dehumanising touch. [email protected].

Corrected to .....

[email protected]

Optional to ...

[email protected]

When I handled these, I always checked for poor taste collisions. If found, granted an immediate exception.

She would be Megan.finger@.

Fuck the old systems with hard character limits.

RIP her inbox.

Megan Bennett Finger
Central Washington University

Ms. Finger,

Per your request, we have converted your email address to our alternate format: [Surname][Middle Initial]Last (to denote the spelled-out name)[First 2 letters of forename]. Your new email address is now [email protected] and your case is now closed.

Thank you,
CWU Support

Worked at a company where emails were first initial then last name. So there was a guy named Shawn Lutz so his email was [email protected]

It seemed I was the only one really aware of that since he almost never sent emails

There was an Alan Buser at my last company…yep, [email protected]. Not only did he have to live with that as his email, but he would occasionally receive reports that definitely should have gone to HR. Eventually they let us alias it to alan@company, but as far as I know when I left he was still getting anything sent to abuser@company too. He was such a nice guy too!

As Nikita Grigorev, I was given an allcaps username made out of first two letters of my name and two letters of surname. I complained, but I was told that the process is a process. They changed for the ANAL guy before, but not for me. So I was called basically a slur for two years

Gosh, I would have never figured this out without the giant useless red line!

My wife's name sounds like Annette Alonso (not her real name - this one is made up) , and her new employer had standardised emails the first two letters from the first name and the first two letters from last name. You bet she was furious with [email protected], given that she was going to be working with clients. She ultimately got it changed to [email protected]

OK, if you insist, I will.

$ finger me
Login: me                               Name: mikhail esteban
Directory: /sdf/udd/m/me                Shell: /bin/ksh
Never logged in.
New mail received Sat Feb 22 13:32 2025 (UTC)
     Unread since Tue Feb  4 07:35 2025 (UTC)
No Plan.

I read that as @uwu

It even tells people where they can do it!

Thank you for the arrow I would've never guess myself

This scheme makes almost every username sound awful. They new what they were doing.

I know how to fix this, just had the 3rd letter of her first name.