They are probably just trying to keep consistency between an AD instance and Exchange or something like that. Or just laziness.
When we generate new user accounts we run a script that generates an email (so we don’t have to manually do it). It gets generated with the username of the individual which in our case would be first initial, last name. Then another alias gets generates to [email protected] and is set as primary. While the [email protected] is left as an alias, but would still technically work if you emailed it.
If a username already exists we will use the first and second letter of the first name and then the last name, etc.
In the above I mentioned consistency and laziness, but there is also another side, and that is your user base. If you are servicing hundreds of thousands of people or just a ton in general, consistency is very much preferred. Try having to explain to an end user that their login is simply “username” for their computer, but their email is “[email protected]” oh and let’s go ahead and loop in Azure SSO so now their software license login and login for all these other portals is “[email protected]”.
You end up with a mass of confusion. Sometimes simplicity is best when it’s possible.
You’d think that every place should do this, but for whatever reason a lot of them do weird shit like in the OP. Not sure why that is. Maybe they are afraid of the characters running too long or something like that for people with long names?
Edit: Wow just reading through some of the real generated emails in this post is wild lol!!
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.
Firstname.lastname@address is pretty much a universal standard, why would you use anything else?
They are probably just trying to keep consistency between an AD instance and Exchange or something like that. Or just laziness.
When we generate new user accounts we run a script that generates an email (so we don’t have to manually do it). It gets generated with the username of the individual which in our case would be first initial, last name. Then another alias gets generates to [email protected] and is set as primary. While the [email protected] is left as an alias, but would still technically work if you emailed it.
If a username already exists we will use the first and second letter of the first name and then the last name, etc.
In the above I mentioned consistency and laziness, but there is also another side, and that is your user base. If you are servicing hundreds of thousands of people or just a ton in general, consistency is very much preferred. Try having to explain to an end user that their login is simply “username” for their computer, but their email is “[email protected]” oh and let’s go ahead and loop in Azure SSO so now their software license login and login for all these other portals is “[email protected]”.
You end up with a mass of confusion. Sometimes simplicity is best when it’s possible.
You’d think that every place should do this, but for whatever reason a lot of them do weird shit like in the OP. Not sure why that is. Maybe they are afraid of the characters running too long or something like that for people with long names?
Edit: Wow just reading through some of the real generated emails in this post is wild lol!!
My work does first initial last name, which even internally results in tons of [email protected].
I don’t really get why I can’t just choose from a list of accepted combinations or something.
This is just supposition but I presume the resmasoning is they want to programatically “calculate” your email address.
I mean that’s a dumb constraint but it does explain the requirement.