Email Name question..........

[BRL]

Hi all. Just wondering why people who have their names in an email, they have a dot between the first name and surname? e.g. [email protected]

Cheers!

[jbrereton]

Dots

Initially I believe it was because the big e-mail suppliers wanted to keep the names back(without the dot) for important people who may crop up in the future, bit like the web address hoarders. Virgin tried this with me and so I e-mailed the supposed person who had the address and no reply. I then got onto virgin with this information and they gave me [email protected].
Jon

[Evo]

At work, it's because it helps people overseas figure out what my name is...

[mikeddavies]

Commonly used where an ISP offers a number of e-mail addresses for one account - if used by a family, for example, the suname part is common, but the first name is different - e.g. joe.blogs@** & mary.blogs@** etc.

MikeD

[spekesoftly]

Could it also simply be that somebody was already using 'joebloggs@**', and so they try the nearest alternatives such as 'joe.blogg@**', 'joe_bloggs@**' etc ?

[Globaliser]

Am I the only person who finds it easier to read the real name out of "joe.bloggs" when compared to "joebloggs"?

[Saab Dastard]

When SMTP was first implemented, there were a great deal of limitations in the character set that could be recognised.

Blank spaces in email addresses were not supported, hence the requirement to introduce a "separator" character that wasn't already reserved for some other special purpose.

I can't be bothered to read the RFC that laid down the bones of SMTP, but there are a raft of reserved characters that cannot be used in addresses, such as "?", "=", "&" etc. etc.

Underscore is frequently used as a name separator, but is more cumbersome and error-prone than "."

Note that the format of the characters that precede the "@" is subject to less stringent requirements than the domain portion of the email address - hence either [email protected] or [email protected] is valid but never saab.dastard@pprune_org

SD