Printed from www.pcpro.co.uk
Posted on September 16th, 2009 by Tim Danton
In search of the world’s most ridiculous email address
This is inspired by a friend of mine who has surely the world’s most ridiculous email address. She works for the local government here in London, and due to the convoluted logic involved – and no doubt some exciting regulations – her email goes something like this:
firstname.portman-early-childhood.westminster@lgfl.net
Just imagine for a second that was your email address. Would you ever attempt to tell people what it is? You can’t even hand out a business card as it would need to be double-width (note that my poor friend isn’t even given a business card… and only gets access to the work email computer once a week).
Anyway, I’m open to alternative suggestions. Have you ever met someone with a worse email address? Or is your own more ridiculous? And while I’m at it, has anyone got a shorter email address than my nice, succinct editor@pcpro.co.uk?
(Obviously, don’t quote your address in any way a bot can harvest it.)
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25 Responses to “ In search of the world’s most ridiculous email address ”
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September 16th, 2009 at 1:32 pm
The best I’ve seen are the MOD ones. All they consit of is a string of what seems like random numbers and letters, no apparent order!
September 16th, 2009 at 3:03 pm
Apparently random numerical email addresses were pretty common during the early (early ’90s) days of the web. Student emails were often matriculation numbers, which were probably not too bad for the actual address holder, but pretty meaningless for everyone else
September 16th, 2009 at 3:18 pm
Anyone got I@bit.ly?
September 16th, 2009 at 3:27 pm
Back in the 90’s, I used to work with a well known global technology company, which used their employee’s payroll numbers as mail addresses.
September 16th, 2009 at 3:33 pm
my address is shorter…
i just don’t want to type it in this box
However you should be able to see it at your end!
September 16th, 2009 at 5:41 pm
One of my students had barbieturd@ [acommonwebmailprovider].com for official correspondence with the university, which I found a trifle inappropriate.
September 16th, 2009 at 7:12 pm
My old uni email address was awful N123456@uni.ac.uk (number and uni changed to protect the innocent) but even worse the “From” field showed as N123456 which always meant dealing with emails from other students was fun – ended up putting our names in the subject field (and later abandoning uni email and using Gmail as OWA was awful)
Then they added
firstname.surname@students.uni.ac.uk which was a bit better, but was quite long!
College was X123456@hotmail .co.uk – our group followed by student ID
My private email address is much smaller – kev @ ABC.me.uk where ABC are my initials
September 16th, 2009 at 9:40 pm
I rather like my matt [at] www . com
September 16th, 2009 at 10:02 pm
My uni email was also weird, I’m sure they do it just to confuse students, its there is some big secret and no one should ever remember their add. You would never give it up without looking it up.
September 17th, 2009 at 6:05 am
I couldn’t get my usual name like e-mail address when I activated my MobileMe account, so I used a form of my company name…
I was an information services company, so I ended up with
surname . is @ me . com
Initially I was a little annoyed, but when it was actually registered and I read it back, I thought hey, pretty cool!
September 17th, 2009 at 7:58 am
I felt sorry for Dorothy Dottat of the Atco Chocolate and Cocoa Company – Dot[dot]Dottat[at]atco[dot]cocoa[dot]co[dot]uk.
Okay it isn’t real but it could be!
My email is firstname[at]surname.org.uk however, which is really easy.
September 17th, 2009 at 9:50 am
I once had rebel.spy@stardestroyer.co.uk. As far as ‘ridicule’ goes, it pretty much put my geek credentials out there for everyone to see
September 17th, 2009 at 10:39 am
I used to have a great one (which was just a redirector as it didn’t store any mail) with a.j@uk.com until they wanted to start charging for it.
I should have paid up!
September 17th, 2009 at 1:06 pm
Does anyone remember X.400? My Dad had an X.400 email service from BT for a while – it had the most ungainly address format ever -example from Wikipedia:
G=Harald;S=Alvestrand;O=Uninett;P=Uninett;A=;C=no
And they wonder why it never caught on?
September 17th, 2009 at 1:08 pm
My companys email format is lastname + first letter of first name @ company.com
A new start joined called Sandra McDonald…cheese burger and fries please?
September 17th, 2009 at 1:32 pm
@Alan – that prompted a colleague of mine to forward me this URL: http://www.buzzfeed.com/awesomer/unfortunate-email-address-cci/
Incidentally, despite a couple of people emailing me direct with their very short email addresses, Matt Russell above is currently the proud owner of the shortest working email address… that I know of.
September 17th, 2009 at 2:12 pm
Mine is simply firstname@surname.co.uk as I have the domain registered. However, some people just can’t comprehend this and tell me I’ve got it wrong.
September 17th, 2009 at 2:40 pm
My email address is info @ something (not saying in this forun) .info
The biggest problem is that most websites wont allow this as as they only seems to allow .com or .something.uk so I end up resorting to a btinternet webmail address.
September 17th, 2009 at 3:46 pm
I can confirm to Colin (post 2) that they weren’t “apparently random”- they were random. I was (I think-memory going:) “cku910@unn.ac.uk”. Genius (still, I suppose it stopped spam). More brilliantly was the fact that- as our mail was hosted on a VAX/VMS system- you had to be REALLY on the ball managing your email because you could only compress your mail file if you had more than 50% of your allocated space free which seemed an odd way to do it (I think it was possible to back up your email to floppy disk but this possibly involved a KERMIT connection to the server).
September 17th, 2009 at 6:58 pm
My wife has her firstname@iol.ie. Her firstname is just 3 letters long so it’s very short (10 characters total!)
September 21st, 2009 at 8:24 am
I got my brother (his initials)@well.com, so that’s 12 characters in total, and a mate has his first name at the same ISP, for a total of 13 characters. Well is part of Salon.com these days and has a small and very californian user base, so short names are still available – or were, until I pointed this out.
I shan’t mention the esteemed journalist who managed to register w*nk*r.com back in the early days and who had ‘helmut’ as his user name and therefore, email address…
September 22nd, 2009 at 4:47 am
I like my friends email id. Its like get(first name last name)@aol.com. I am still trying to get such types of email id.
September 22nd, 2009 at 11:00 pm
A while ago I had a fad for strange addresses. I’ve got bornag at in dot com (write it down!); davros at who dot net, and one or two others. I’m really pleased with my short address which is abc at d dot ef (not the real letters), probably the shortest you can have. Sadly I don’t own the domain, or I could retire.
September 23rd, 2009 at 1:25 pm
I used to have pete@[major Belgian ISP].be which was cool, but it attracted a ton of spam – I lost it when I left the country in 2005.
I also have a nice short email address I use for redirection to other mailboxes that I read:
pete [at] mono . org
September 23rd, 2009 at 3:09 pm
Returning to the odd address theme…Some years ago, if you sent an MP a message via the “House of Commons WebSite Constituency Locata Service” you could opt to receive a copy of the text you had typed. The automated sender quoted a ‘from’ address of :
informix(at)beast (dot)whereonearth(dot)com .
It just said so much about the House of Commons really.
R