You can tell it’s fake based on the fact the signatures don’t have 3 images shilling whatever internal feel-good initiative upper management is shilling this month. Those are great for email 2 ticketing systems … sigh.

I hate my life.

At my old job we had a system of first initial + last name, or if that was already taken then the first two characters of first name + last name, etc. A ticket came into us from an Lo[…] Li who had some concerns about being loli@bignamecompany.com. We obviously gave him an alias.

Back in the day when a lot of things things were capped at 8 characters, my uncle used to work for a company where they had (first 7 letters of last name) + (first letter of first name).

At least until they hired a woman named Margaret Manspera. Luckily, mansperm@company.com was spotted in advance, and she was given margaret@company.com instead.

Used to work on an AS400 inventory system. First 5 letters of your last name+ first letter of your first name. New hire named Sean Moroney ended up with “morons” as his handle and they wouldn’t change it. Felt so bad for the dude lol

Always think of Shawna Hart for the first initial last name type of aliases.

I saw one of these in action! I never actually knew her, but she was cc’ed in a lot of the emails I was getting. Our emails were first initial, middle initial, first three letters of last name, then extra digits if needed. J. E. Lloyd had “jello@…”

One of the systems we currently use at work just shortens the first name to 1-4 characters and adds the last name. I still have to figure out on what criteria.

The bad thing about it is that it sometimes changes names to the other gender - think Erica to Eric. I never realized how often that could be done in my language by chance and it only affects female names.

Normally that would matter much but three weeks ago they established that account name as our new matrix chat handles…

Honestly, IT should just really ask “What do you want your email address to be?” and not auto-assign. Just give IT a general alias so that your chat name, email address, source control account, or any other account, can all be the same. The issue is that some people are going to want the same exact alias and then that creates a back and forth but at bigger places, IT should be able to cut out some time to make a system to check if a username is taken and just send that to new hires. For smaller places, collisions like that are less likely to happen.