On Wed, 26 Jan 2000, Jethro R Binks wrote:
> Ideally, we'd like all outgoing mail to be of the form
> I.N.Bloggs@???, and all incoming mail to be addressed the same,
You are asking for trouble, IMHO, assuming there are several thousand
addresses involved. Real life names are not unique. Let me see, did I
save that message about a horror story? Ah yes, here it is. It was
posted to the DRUMS list about 6 months ago:
"I have seen the definition of ecstasy. It is this.
Once upon a time, I worked for a large company (6 digits worth of
employees). Me and my fellow malcontents argued vigorously for
several years for permanent and unique email IDs. Powers That Be
argued back that <Last@???> or <First.Last@???> or
<First.M.Last@???> or even <First.M.Last/shoesize=9.5@???>
were surely unique enough (and were dynamically resolved in a
company-wide database). It was the officially recommended way to have
your email address on your business cards and whatnot.
At one time, there were three people in the company with the same
First.Last as me (one with the same middle initial), but that argument
didn't prevail, presumably because I was just lowly scum. Then one
holy and blessed day, the company hired a person who happened to have
the same First.Last as one of the Powers That Be, instantly
invalidating his business cards and .sig file. The permanent and
unique (and, incidentally, user-selected) email ID feature was added
to the company-wide database within a couple of months.
We put down our torches and pitch forks and danced in the streets."
--
Philip Hazel University of Cambridge Computing Service,
ph10@??? Cambridge, England. Phone: +44 1223 334714.
