Dave Close wrote: > An employer has a similar system. But the numbers are sequential so, > were they email addresses, a spammer could hit nearly everyone without > hardly trying. And they would create the hazard of sending mail to the > wrong person inadvertently, with no reliable confirmation of just who > actually got the message. > My employer has a seven character ID for all employees (1 alpha, 6 digits), which is either randomly generated or based on some fairly random hashing because the one day when ten or twelve of us all started at the same time in the same organization, we got spread out over h, j, o, i, d, f and several others I can't remember. We still use some variation on first.[m.]last as our email address, but if you know the particular person's employee ID, you can use it as well. It works reasonably well, except for those situations where someone goes by something that in no way resembles their real name (I've yet to understand how Tom Marks is actually William J Marks, or Ramar Chandra is really Ramasivar Kumarswalchandra, and how I'm supposed to look him up in the phone book if I don't know that) or the fairly rare John.Q1.Smith. They also from time to time make modifications to the standard to throw a monkey wrench in things, particularly around contractors and offshore personnel. At one point it was all contractors have to have "x" for the middle initial part of the name (which broke badly when we started getting lots of people with middle names like Xavier), then they decided that they would throw the contractor's contract house on the end of the name (because someone obviously thought we only worked with contract houses that had a single short name like Atos) which made it impossible to look someone up in the online phone book, because it wasn't smart enough to understand that "John Smith" could be John.Smith-Origin.
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