Slashdot Mirror
Ask Slashdot: Name Conflicts In Automatically Generated Email Addresses?
New submitter matteocorti writes "I work at medium-sized university and we are considering reducing the number of domains used for email addresses (now around 350): the goal is to have all the 30K personal addresses in a single domain. This will increase the clashes for the local part of the address for people with the same first and last name (1.6%). We are considering several options: one of them is to use 'username@domain.tld' and the other is to use 'first.last@domain.tld.' The first case will avoid any conflict in the addresses (usernames are unique) but the second is fancier. Which approach does your organization use? How are name conflicts (homonyms) solved? Manually or automatically (e.g., by adding a number)?"
http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-names/
How can I believe you when you tell me what I don't want to hear?
We've had two username collisions at our company, we avoided them by adding a middle initial.
I went to eat some animal crackers and the box said, "Do not eat if seal is broken." I opened the box and sure enough..
Then let them use a private, on-line account.
In a professional environment, you always use your real name. Yes, I know this is a university, but someday the students are going to need to learn how the business world works.
I can mend the break of day, heal a broken heart, and provide temporary relief to nymphomaniacs.
I have 3 solutions.
First is to misspell names. Science has proven that you can unjumble all but the first character.
john.doe@company.com
jhon.doe@company.com
jnho.doe@company.com
Second one is to increment the punctuation. This may be a bit confusing, but at least everyone has their correct name.
john.doe@company.com
john,doe@company.com
john_doe@company.com
john-doe@company.com
etc.
Third idea is to have them share. Why do they all need their own? Things will be addressed to the correct name. If don't want to share emails, just change your name.
If usernames won't give conflicts, then use them. And for the people that wants fancier emails, you can put aliases as firstname.lastname while there are no duplicates
My university takes the unique usernames approach ( abc123@mail.domain.tld ), but also creates aliases for everyone ( generally in the form first.last@domain.tld , but the user actually can choose whatever they want, if there's a collision). Seems to work well enough.
I presume the old format looked like:
emailname@subdomain.domain.com
Make the new ones:
emailname.subdomain@domain.com
This should prevent any name clashes and still move all the emails to one domain and even preserve the similar format the users already have. New users may not even need their own .subdomain after the email name, but you'll be adding them as you go forward and can check for clashes when they are added and maybe just add a .subdomain to them, or numbers to the end.
Things you think are in the Constitution, but are not.
It is a Western university.
First off, no one wants a 200 character email address and we are limited to Western characters.
Anyone going to a Western university has a Western style name to use in cases such as this.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
If the person is a United States resident, at least, they have something filled in in the "surname" and "given name" sections of their birth certificate (if born in the US) naturalization certificate, green card, or visa document. That might not be true in all western countries, but I know it's true in Denmark as well: to work or study legally in the country you need to register with the Citizen Register and list something in those boxes. Then the university will just use whatever your state registration says.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Keep in mind that as a university you are going to have a much larger turnover than a standard organisation, so their strategies may not be suitable for you. I would suggest that using any combination of First Name and Last Name will give you a pretty large amount of collisions, either with current users, or with past users. Collisions with past users may not seem like a huge problem until you get a ton of new users asking you why their accounts filled up with donkey porn spam on the first day. Of course you could do something like including their first year in the account, i.e. joe.bloggs.2013@uni.edu. But it's probably just easier to use the username (as long as that is unique of course)
"Hey there, I'm Gary Wilson. I'd like to get more information about this petition you're circulating, but I'm running late to class... can you email me more info?"
"Sure, Gary. Thanks for your interest. What's your email address? Gary.Wilson@myuniversity.edu?"
"No, it's generated using a salted hashing algorithm, it's actually 8msMWlk09$1)_23@myuniversity.edu"
"uh...... yeah, why don't I just give you my card, you can contact me later."
This is the first question you should ask. Once upon a time I worked for a department that managed its own email, and hence had it's own domain. Someone had the bright idea of consolidating to just use the central email solution in the interest of saving time/money, in spite of the fact that managing mail took very little time and very little money. Transitioning everyone took a lot more time than managing the original process, shoehorned people into arbitrarily small mail quotas (hint: do not tell people who cost $100+/hour that they need to manage their email to fit in an amount of disk that you can buy for a dollar), made them less efficient and less happy as they had to switch from mail clients they knew well and were happy with to unfamiliar ones they didn't like.
In the end, we spent more time and money making everyone less happy and less efficient than if we'd just left it alone.
As far as simply avoiding clashes, consider that this is one of the benefits of there being a hierarchy in DNS. You can have bob.smith@finance.domain.com, bob.smith@engineering.domain.com, bob.smith@sales.domain.com, etc. Is there an actual requirement for everyone to be @domain.com, or is someone just empire building?
I prefer full.name@.
Sincerely,
Pen Islicker
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
Here's a solution to this problem: If there is more than one John Doe, you change them _all_ to john.doe followed by a random but unique three digit number. john.doe itself is redirected and automatically gives a reply containing the list of correct john.doe email addresses plus some information that makes them identifiable.
So if I wanted to email John Doe in accounting, I'll get an email back telling me the CEO is john.doe386, there is john.doe196 in accounting, and the janitor john.doe412.
I don't want a middle initial. It was completely useless, if it weren't for filling out forms designed by stupid data collectors.
My father's three names are those of his grandfather, his father and this own given name. Reversing the order of the names to fit into a form is pointless, dropping one is pointless too, and accepting his grandfather's name as his own for the sake of some silly database is too.
It gets worse if you have people whose names don't follow the "a name consists of exactly one word" rule. What's your rule to convert Antonio dell'Acqua into an email address?
Those people should probably not correspond from their university email, and instead sign up for a Gmail account. It's free, you know.
DRM: Terminator crops for your mind!
But I've seen a kind of "artificial" middle initial, where the first John Smith gets the email address john.smith@organisation.tld, the second becomes john.a.smith@organisation.tld, the third one john.b.smith@organisation.tld etc.pp.
My early big-systems computing life was with the e-mail system at Dartmouth that went to real names in the 80's. There were twenty thousand-ish users and there definitely were a few name collisions with the First.M.Last standard.
There were two solutions. First was a user-editable nickname field. Just a space separated list that could be used to add to matching rules.
So, I had a proper e-mail left part of 'William.P.McGonigle' but my nickname field consisted of 'bill wpm skynet photographer sigep' to help other people find me. Only the real address was guaranteed unique but for phone conversations I could tell people wpm@ (it was unique at the time). People could get me at my machine name that way, look me up in the directory, address me as bill.mcgonigle, etc. (it would combine all dot separated parts with nicknames and department names to find matches).
So, if there were 20,000 people happily using this system, there were four people who it didn't work for, and those were people with the exact same name as somebody who was already on campus. The usual choice was to adopt a different middle initial, use a full middle name, or to accept the nickname as the real first name.
Now, there was always a contingent of people (I won't say aspy nerds because that would be rude) who insisted that those were WRONG and that the addressing scheme had to work exactly the same way for everybody. They probably advocated bmcgo654@ for my e-mail address. But what they missed was that the utility of the system that was in use was so high that it greatly outvalued having a 'perfect' system that had very low utility.
If we lived in a world where every e-mail user could easily query the other institution's LDAP and not run the risk of spam, then that might be fine. But we don't, so easy to use addresses makes the computers easier to use.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Where I last worked, there were over 110K employees and we had plenty of people sharing the same name. Here's how it went.
Default: first.last@xxx.gov
Same names: first.middleinitial.last@xxx.gov
Still the same: Senior employee got first.middleinitial.last@xxx.gov. Junior employee got first.x.last@xxx.gov.
Still the same? Increment the middle initial. The first person with the same name as someone else got an "x", the second person got a "y", the third got a "z", and I don't think we ever needed to exceed that. If necessary, we would have just continued through the alphabet, starting back at "a".
The biggest single problem we had with names and email addresses was employees who were legally empowered to use a different identity when dealing with the public. Anything that the public might see (their name or signature on a document, their email address, etc.) was a pseudonym, yet we had to use their legal names for internal purposes. Undercovers are a pain but I assume the OP won't be dealing with that. :-)
My name is a hyperintelligent shade of the colour blue.