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Email username convention

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by reidj001

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Currently I use a standard convention of the first initial of the first name followed by up to 7 letters of the last name. If the username is duplicated a number is placed at the 7th or 8th positions.

It has been suggested that we change this convention to joe.doe@campus.school.edu since W2K can handle this. My problem with this is the possibility of stalker type activity or privacy issues. With the convention of jdoe@campus.school.edu the only thing that can be sure of is the first name starts with a J and the last name is Doe. With the other convention you would know that the students name is Joe Doe and what Campus and School he attends.

Am I correct in thinking that the email address should not tell the exact whereabouts when dealing with a school.

Any ideas on this or discussion, thanks.

3 replies

by diabetic

Personally, I prefer the joe.smith@xxx.com format, since it eliminate a lot of errors or guesswork.

Equally, I dislike joe_smith@xxx.com because there are still too many users our there who struggle with the underscore and the underscore is oftenobscured when an address is underlined.

I think your concerns over privacy are valid, and certainly need to carry some weight in your consideration. There is no pat answer. You wil need to balance the convenience of full names against the partialprivacy affored by your current naming convention.

Of course, the best privacy is from totally random e-mail addresses, but that is rarely practical.

In weighing your decision, you might want to look carefully at the demographics of the students, faculty and staff as well as the demographics of the community.

Whatever you do, make sure that the decision is made by someone several pay grades higher than your own -- put together a presentation with all of the facts, the advantages and disadvantages of both, and put the decision up the chain of command.

by ebob

What price "privacy"? What price "ease of use"? And these are a couple of concerns with conflicting values.

As you have both suggested, "john.doe@campus.school.edu" (or whatever) is easy to remember, but more open to abuse than "jdoe@...".

Nothing beats arbitrary mailbox names for limiting abuse. "xjf07i@..." doesn't tell me anything about the user. But it's obviously hopelessly difficult for the user her-/him-self to remember, let alone porovide to others.

Another thought: using "first.last@..." is still not going to get you out of the duplication issue which started the initial thought. Yes, it will limit duplications, but it will still come up from time to time.

You might want to consider using the student's ID number, which at least is something to which they might be able to relate, and is almost guaranteed to be unique: 01735@campus.school.edu

by kolossus

If you are concerned about security and you want something easy to use try the first name followed by the last initial: johnd@campus.school.edu. If the persons name was Bill Gatesabub then which name do you think would be more secure: bgatesabub@campus.school.edu or billg@campus.school.edu. If there is a lot of billg's then you can go to the next letter in there last name or numbers.

Hopefully this will help you out!

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