In the world of e-mail there is an underlying nerd technology known as SMTP. SMTP stands for Simple Mail Transfer Protocol. When you send an email to someone, the address is entered as user@domain.com, which is an SMTP address. The domain.com tells where on the Internet to go. Once it reaches the server, it finds the mailbox for "user" and the message is delivered so that you can read it.
In corporate environments there are rules for how your SMTP address is created. I was looking to take a survey of corporate clients to see what they do with their policy.
For example, Microsoft uses as a default:
Complete Firstname + first initial of your last name + @microsoft.com
So my Chris Smith's email address would be: chrisS@microsoft.com
There is more than one Chris Smith (or rather Chris Sxxxx) - so there would be rules for collision detection, and an increment, or whatever. Let's keep it simple.
Some companies are going for:
Complete Firstname + . + Complete Lastname + @domain.com:
ankur.kothari@ankurandgenny.com
In the end, a corporation usually wants the SMTP addresses to be simple and easy to dictate over a phone. For some people it would be easier to say over the phone "Chris dot Smith at microsoft dot com" and for others it would be easier to say "A N K U R K O at microsoft dot com"
Looking through my Business Contacts, I made the following table (excluding microsoft):
° firstname.lastname (or slight variation): 16
° firstinitial + lastname: 27
° firstname: 6
° firstname.middle initial.lastname (or slight variation): 4
° lastname + firstinitial: 2
° firstinitial + last character of first name.lastname: 1
° firstname +lastinitial: 2
° firstinitial.middleinitial.lastname: 1
The SMTP addresses of firstname@domain.com are not realistic and I won't include them in the chart. The reason is that all of these people are E-mail architects or admins, so they created the special name for themselves.
So by my primitive case study, I've determined that most organizations like to use firstinitial+lastname (akothari) as the first half of the address. A solid second is firstname.lastname (ankur.kothari).
I hope no one actually uses this data, because each organization has different requirements and shouldn't just follow-the-leader, but I'm an email guy, so this is kinda interesting to me.
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