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The One-Name Email, a Silicon Valley Status Symbol, Is Wreaking Havoc (wsj.com)
In Silicon Valley, first-name-only email addresses have long been the ultimate status symbol, indicating a techie was an early hire at a new company. Now that startups are growing, the one-namers are wreaking havoc -- and the competition to snag them is fierce. From a report on WSJ: When Peter Szabo heard he and his co-workers would receive new email addresses after his tech company was launched from an incubator, he ran to his boss and confirmed he would get the "Peter" first-name email address. After years of failing to arrive at companies early enough to bag the prized address, Mr. Szabo negotiated getting the single-name email at the earliest opportunity. "As companies get bigger, if you can be the original Peter, absolutely that's bragging rights," said Mr. Szabo, who is chief revenue officer of mobile-entertainment network startup Mammoth Media. "It's huge."
[...] Startups are growing faster than at any time since the dot-com boom thanks to a flood of venture capital. The system of using first names is leading to more email misfires at tech companies the more successful, and larger, they get. {...] Even techies are having a hard time figuring out how to disrupt the naming convention of corporate email. The growing pains usually set in when startups reach 25 to 50 employees, as names begin to overlap, according to Josh Walter, who has designed email services for companies for the past eight years. "That's when companies say, 'Oh no, what do we do now?'" Mr. Walter says. He is currently IT engineer at Second Measure, a Silicon Valley startup that analyzes consumer spending.
[...] Startups are growing faster than at any time since the dot-com boom thanks to a flood of venture capital. The system of using first names is leading to more email misfires at tech companies the more successful, and larger, they get. {...] Even techies are having a hard time figuring out how to disrupt the naming convention of corporate email. The growing pains usually set in when startups reach 25 to 50 employees, as names begin to overlap, according to Josh Walter, who has designed email services for companies for the past eight years. "That's when companies say, 'Oh no, what do we do now?'" Mr. Walter says. He is currently IT engineer at Second Measure, a Silicon Valley startup that analyzes consumer spending.
i just can't even.....
You can always request "dumbass" @yourstartup.com. While many may qualify, few will have the honesty to request it.
I had a "first name" email address with a common first name. I changed it pretty quickly as I got deluged with spam.
Henceforth, all my new email addresses will be "one-name@..."
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
Single-handedly, and single-namedly, the dumbest ever post I have encountered on /.
I have a 1 letter email address on a 3 letter domain
"Freedom in the USA is not the ability to do what you want. It is the ability to stop others from doing what THEY want"
I read this story earlier today. The fundamental problem appears to be people who are too lazy to actually look up an email address. They’re pretty much all complaining that “I know a guy named Alex who works at Twitter, so I sent an email to alex@twitter.com but that wasn’t my guy’s address.”
#DeleteChrome
Did you even read.....
Oh wait, this is crapdot, nobody reads here.
Seriously, this is talking about INTERNAL COMPANY EMAIL. Are you going to buy your own .com domain for a company email address for every employee?
more status to own your own domain, especially when job hunting or communicating behind your pimp-daddy boss's ass
I use a@aol.com for a lot of fake registrations.
Sorry about that.
...just hire people named like Major Major Major Major.
It seems odd that in the days of phone numbers being portable we don't have a portable email identity because there is no addressing system.
It would be nice to have a decentralized distributed addressing system that allows us to separate our identity from these providers. Multiple mailboxes could be handled by some type of key system that is a layer under the address. Those could even direct to different providers. I could give one key to family members, others to each employer, others to places I shop online at, etc. There would also be a default mailbox for people without a key.
It could also be taken to another level and provide access to my phone or any other media. Then I could default all with no key to the voicemail / spam filtering system.
Probably better to sell shovels in a gold rush. Unless you're using the axes to murder miners and take their gold. But then you'll also need a shovel anyway...
I guess this is the modern day equivalent of the corner office.
When I was young I got one of those (corner locations) and thought it was the schizzle. Turns out the big pillar running through it made the space much less usable and nobody cared anyway.
Back when the Internet was mostly for nerds, the solution to this problem was a finger query away.
Knowledge is power; knowledge shared is power lost.
My question is, why is /. reporting on this irrelevant idiocy?
This is msmash's MO, post about first world millennial issues, SJWism, UBB, feminism, etc., things that have no or minimal relation to tech with little to no quality assurance. Typically when you see a vacuous Slashdot post, msmash is responsible.
Seriously, nobody cares that you are the first "Joe" at a generic startup with the life expectancy of a fruit fly, trying desperately to slurp up some VC money before fizzling.
Since I'm a (clean shaven) Unix graybeard, my login and email address are my initials, as Dennis Ritchie intended. More often than not, I find that convention does signal having a technical clue.
Like people who used to brag about how low their ICQ number was, or how how their slashdot id is etc...
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
Having been in a position of having a common first-name email at a company, I will never accept that in the future, even if offered. It results in getting all the emails for all the people with the same first name, plus a bunch of emails from external people who can't get ahold of anyone so they just start randomly spamming likely addresses. In any case, autocomplete supersedes any time-saving advantage it would offer.
As far as being a "status symbol", that's even worse. If your company is successful, you'll end up spending all of your time trying to avoid projecting status, trying to fade into the background and just be a regular employee to the extent possible. Unless, of course, you're an asshat, in which case you'll glory in your status projection (and hopefully, for the sake of your co-workers, be let go).
There is a difference between "first name" and "given name" for Hungarian names.
This nit was picked for you by Anonymous Coward.
Thank you, thank you, I'll be here all week.
I managed to grab a first-name email address for MIT's alumni email forwarding service, by virtue of randomly happening to be online and checking out the alumni website a few minutes after the service went live. It ends up getting a boatload of spam (apparently one of spammers' algorithms is to blindly send spam to [common name]@[domain]), and misdirected emails intended for other alumni with the same first name. What's even more fun is when one of those alumni signs up for a mailing list website and forgets to add their last name or whatever to their email address, resulting in them signing me up.
/dev/null.
It's just an alumni forwarding service so I can tolerate it. I just whitelist the emails I expect to get at that address and set my spam filtering to really aggressive. But if it were going to be my main email address, I'd much prefer firstname.lastname@domain or firstname123@domain or something similarly easy to remember but more obscure. I own my own domain and run my main email through it. But I've long since abandoned firstname@mydomain.com to spam, and just redirect that to
News for nerds. Not tech news, news for nerds.
It's a slow Sunday, don't get your knickers in a twist.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Peter strikes me as a bit Cocky... I mean, bragging rights waved around Willy nilly is a Dick move. Just remember to take a calming bath, massage your hands with Johnson's baby oil, and write in your journal. Paper and a Pen is a good way to collect one's thoughts.
... ... when you hire immature people.
New rule on my interview list, anyone that shows any serious interest in one-name email address results in the interview being terminated at that point with a "thank you, but you just won't work out".
And this is why it's important for companies, from day one, to set a sane standard for server names, email addresses, and any other naming convention so they are practical and not 'cute'. And to hire lead people that have actually worked for a living instead of fresh out of a University so they know more things than Universities teach.
And no, in my 40-year career, I have never named a server after a Star Wars character.
I rarely read replies, it's my opinion and if you thought about your opinion a little more, I'm OK with that.
.biz doesn't count.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
Look, not every article's going to be a winner, especially on a slow Sunday in June. But this is just nuts. What value is there in this article? Worse yet, the source article is behind a WSJ paywall.
It's not news. It helps nobody. C'mon Slashdot, do better, and pick editors who know the difference between news and not news.
Software Shouldn't Suck
E-mail: frank at jacquette dot spamless com (remove the spamless!)
This isn't even news for nerds. It's news for IT guys that AREN'T nerds.
Starting a company? Getting your own email server?
firstname.lastname@companyname.tld
Possibly add in aliases such as ceo@, cfo@, customerservice@ etc.
STOP allowing for bullshit epeen addresses, period. Do it from day one.
-=This sig has nothing to do with my comment. Move along now=-
Just to add an extra touch of incompetence, the only link is to a story that you can't read unless you're a WSJ subscriber.
Many a dyslexic just got triggered. On both sides.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
Single name addresses are no big deal. What's a big status symbol is single-letter addresses; ask Rob Pike, his single-letter address causes "go" afficianados to swoon.
I tend to go by value of stock options and RSUs, but what do I know, I'm a NYC techie, not a Silicon Valley one.
If you're flush with VC money, you obviously get your own domain name for your e-mail. Something like peter@moneywastingstartup.com is probably still available.
You don't need a shovel. They already got one. Probably a ready hole in the ground too.
And if you're a dedicated axe murderer, you don't even need an axe. At least back then you didn't need to own one.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
Related question is why Slashdot regularly links to paywalled articles. Maybe Slashdot is chasing referral revenue?...
Don't know, but another reason this site is a joke. If it wasn't for the comments (sure, many, including this one are trash), there would be no reason to visit here ever again. It was very telling when Slashdot, along with SourceForge, experienced web problems for many days several months ago, few seemed to care.
Slashdot needs a reboot. Not talking Beta, but rather enhancing the site with more in-depth content (ie. like what ARS has been doing for years) along with staff who take some pride in their work would go a long way.
I'm amazed that in this day and age I still have problems going by my first initial and middle name. I have about a 30/70% shot of it being correct at any given time. And so many databases have no provision for middle name, only first name and initial.
About the only thing that would be more problematic would be to have an Arabic name.
"Well, good luck finding a judge that doesn't run a bestiality site."
I don't think that GMail never let people have e-mail addresses that short, knowing that they would be spam magnets.
Hell... I have a firstnamelastinitial@gmail.com address, and the amount of misdirected e-mail I get is insane.
And yet that still has nothing to do with this article. This is about the naming scheme of a company's email directory.
And never use ceo@ or cfo@ or anything so generic as those would quickly be filled with SPAM and Phishing. No solution would block all of that deluge.
From the visible first paragraph, I gather that it's something to do with a putative shortage of email addresses on the part of those without the creative imagination it takes to use the full power of a 26-character alphabet to come up with an email handle more memorable than phil179485@gmail.com.
I've got (name)@(surname).com should I brag about it? /. ? ;-)
I own the domain (surname).com, so all of my family-member have simple e-mail adresses - even the newborns will have!
Or should I brag about my 2-letter nick here on
I've used open source software since the 1980s, and the past 6 or 7 years have been awful. Linux from 2018 is way worse than Linux from 2008.
You are full of shit.
I'm using Linux on my main desktop today, and while possible, it would not have been such a pleasant experience in 2008. Back then, it was also still a pain in the ass to make cross-browser web pages (Boostrap came out in 2011); subversion was sitll bigger than git, so creating branches meant creating folders and committing code was impossible if the central server was down; storing objects in databases still required an ORM; the only server-side JavaScript framework was from Microsoft and it was the opposite of non-blocking. There was no docker, no vagrant, no ansible; nginx was still obscure, and while sluggish distributed computing was possible thanks to MapReduce, actual machine learning was still a wet dream (Spark came out years later) and AI was pure science-fiction (GPUs were still mostly used for video processing).
Don't rewrite history, and stop wishing harm to people who care about making the world a better place with their code.
lucm, indeed.
If this article isn't facetious, then people are really retarded.
If you own a domain you can use any e-mail address you want.
Are people really that retarded? Yes, I believe they probably are.
I mean, that Szabo fellow, what is he - like a twelve-year old? For his maturity does not seem to go beyond that. Bragging rights. Really?
If you're flush with VC money, you obviously get your own domain name for your e-mail.
Anyone can afford the domain fee ($9/year) and the fancy Google or Office365 email service ($5/month).
VC money should be used for something more useful, like the lawyers at Boies that allowed Theranos to burn through $900 million on 10 years of vaporware without being publicly challenged (it's the same law firm that negotiated Harvey Weinstein's severance, that was hired by Oracle to sue Google over Android/Java, that was representing SCO in their UNIX lawsuits, that defended the Enron CFO, and that represented Big Tobacco when they appealed cancer lawsuits).
Other good uses of VC money is sexual harassment lawsuits (Uber), "company" houses in the Hamptons and LA (Mode media), worthless music streaming platform acquisition (Guvera) or decommissioned Soviet fighter jets (Terralliance).
lucm, indeed.
Even better, have everyone use the same Gmail account, and pretend you're using Slack.
lucm, indeed.
> he ran to his boss and confirmed he would get the "Peter" first-name email address
You're a bunch of idiots who have lost your sense of priorities.
- billg@microsoft.com
Ok, that is just a dumb thing. Not a status symbol.
It's a .net, but still ;) I keep forgetting about all these new tlds damned shame.
"Freedom in the USA is not the ability to do what you want. It is the ability to stop others from doing what THEY want"
This isn't even news for nerds. It's news for IT guys that AREN'T nerds.
Perhaps you need to go to a site that doesn't piss you off so much?
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Let me explain something to you about /. that is really important. NOBODY reads the articles.
It's always been about the comments.
I can't bitch about /. being down on /. if /. is down.
Now I just shot beer out of my nose. Thanks.
I@VI
Put an MX record on a TLD?
Sure, back in the days when email clients followed strict protocol, before every JS and php jockey scripted in their favorite arbitrary limitations to front ends, count dots and strike odd characters. The days when adding mailbox+anything@ was guaranteed to deliver to mailbox@ ...when you were actually encouraged to place a final trailing dot to your email address to subvert delays from the many "try it as a hostname if it's not final-dotted" resolvers that were out there in use, those were hairy. All so people in marketing could email "harry@sales" and it would be delivered internally because it would try sales.thecorp.com.
I tacked the MX record on to the TLD, sent a few emails to myself from several shells and www-email gateways worldwide which delivered successfully... then took it out because we didn't have a business model for it and I didn't want to introduce any bizarre side effects. It was like Internet nerd blueboxing.
<blink>down the rabbit hole</blink>
Linux from 2018 is way worse than Linux from 2008.
Just say it: systemd
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
Sincerely,
Zz!zyx Smith
Oh no! These first name only email addresses confuse me. I'm new at this and I've only been using email for 25 years. I can't understand how to type in a name or use an address book. derp!
If silicon valley can't figure out how to email, we're in a lot worse trouble than I thought.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
There is some (recent ?) rule it must be 2 letters. Once I couldn't unsubscribe my 1 letter email address from a commercial mail list because it couldn't be 1 letter. My domain is my first name so a first name address would be lame.
Change your name to Zebamrulator and you can get the first name email wherever you go
Same, but I changed it to my first name instead of a single letter. Apparently a lot of email forms and email providers think single letter prefixes are spam.
Eat the rich.
F u, Szabo. "Cornell University has an electrone microscope..." blah blah
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
I'm lucky enough to have myfirstname@email.com. You get lots of free accounts with this... Follow this link to change your password on xyz.com, why thankyou, I think I will!!! ;-)
Seriously though, why dont these companies ever let me say some one else signed up with my email address so let them change it.
Waterfox - a Firefox fork with legacy extension support, security updates and better privacy by default.
>> "Startups are growing faster than at any time since the dot-com boom thanks to a flood of venture capital." I can recall the last one.
This.
This will also solve the narcissic single name e-mail problem.
aaaaaaa
They dropped the "news for nerds" slogan a few years back. Were you away on hajj?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Yes, don't criticise Slashdot, they would much rather lose all their visitors than hear what their visitors actually want to read about.
It isn't possible to just ignore the story?
All the Slashdot articles are arranged by topic, right at the top of the page. You can filter by score, and You can even block the articles posted by various editors.
A whole lot of filtration is available, so the whining of someone who can't figure out how to first filter out the offending stories, and as a last resort, simply not click on them is likely not to be taken seriously.
Reminds me of the old farts who would join mailing lists, then bitch about every email they got, or even reported it as spam. I would quietly unsubscribe them without a notice, which seemed to make them happy. "I see you finally got that email reflector fixed, Ol! Its about time!"
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Yep. He/She/It has about got me ditching /. again.
Doesn't work. Here at a company with less than 600 employees, we have two John E. Smiths, three Jason Johnsons (of whom two have the same middle name) and we have six people named "Dolores Rodriguez" of whom three have no middle name. I can't explain the Dolores factor, other than to say that statistically it had to happen to somebody.
This is known, you can't map non-unique human names directly to a namespace that requires uniqueness.
In the end, despite the corrupting influence of Microsoft Outlook and the scourge of "friendly names" obscuring real addresses some kind of human intelligence, namespace understanding and pattern awareness is required to use email effectively. Just knowing a human name is not enough, you'll have to learn people's email addresses.
Eric Allman said decades ago:
fake registrations
chuck.u.farley@mouse-potato.com
Gives their admins something to clean up as well.
Have gnu, will travel.
This has been a problem since, oh, 1960. ARPANET faced this I'm betting, and of course .MIL. Commercial email certainly faced this damned quick, as AOL in particular was forcing naming conventions in 1992 or before, and Compuserve before that.
Really, single name addresses are only useful to spammers.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
True. I have had first-name address and do not really like it. It isnt an address...it is obscure.
I object to power without constructive purpose. --Spock
Ars is quite a bit more than unseemly college drop-outs shit-posting as editors.
You would have to pay intelligent, educated writers and journalists to match the content. Costly!
I object to power without constructive purpose. --Spock
If you envision having employees numbering in the 10s of thousands, consider adding middle initial (firstname..lastname). That was a significant benefit to avoiding namespace collisions when planning e-mail naming for a 40,000 employee company in the US (we ran the numbers on various ways to encode names into e-mail addresses to see what worked best). Of course, we had the benefit of knowing that we had 10s of thousands of employees BEFORE we created the standardized e-mail namespace. This was a while ago when creating a standardized e-mail namespace was relatively new even for a company with many employees.
That used to be a thing in the 1990s. ned@something.com or joe@something.com. Then they used to get spam like crazy. I'd see e-mail for and it would start with the a's and go through the z's, male and female names.
Much better to have your initials instead of something like jdoe@something.com or john.doe@something.com. Just jmd@something.com.
Of course there are companies like the one that I work for that publicly put out there all of the internal e-mail addresses like idiots. They say we have anti-spam stuff... yea, sure. Runs on outlook. So instead of 5000 messages a day we get more like 100 useless messages a day.
so what's the prestige of having first name in that? you're someone else's bitch if you lost it. the owners will never have this problem.