The Grand Illusion
Some long months ago I contacted an organization about scheduling something. I waited, and waited, and heard no response. I tried again, and again. No response. I nosed around and found the personal email of the head scheduler, and inquired again. I got a curt response saying that I couldn’t be accommodated because I’d made my request too late, despite the fact that I’d made mine months before others who had been accommodated,although the scheduling was supposedly on a first come, first accommodated basis. When I pointed this out, the response was equally curt, to the effect that too many people had requested to be scheduled. I shouldn’t have been surprised. The personal email address was: Me@[person’s name].net.
I wondered about this. I have friends with email addresses such as Bob@BobZwerkel.net [this is fictional, I hope] or djs@djsplace.com, but then I started looking around, and discovered more than a few email addresses where the primary initial name was Me@ wherever.com. I think most of us use some identifier in our email address so that people can easily remember or find it, and I don’t think that’s particularly egotistical. Perhaps I’m just horribly outdated or old-fashioned, but using the word “me” as the initial identifier in the email address seems incredibly self-centered.
Is this another facet of the “Me” Generation? A blatant – or thoughtless – declaration to the world that “I’m the only important person at this address.”? A convenient quick decision with little consideration for what others just might think? A disregard for convention? Another generational thumbing of the nose at manners or what they believe to be phony and false modesty? Or something else entirely?
I have no idea, but, given the responses of the person whose email address spurred these thoughts, that person was anything but modest or helpful, and I have to wonder what percentage of the people who have email addresses at Me@me.com are that self-centered and dismissive.
I can’t recall ever seeing a me@ email address before. I’ve seen artist/musicians/authors with personal domains and to me that makes perfect sense since they are the product of their businesses. I judge people by their email addresses. If I see a aol.com email I think of that person as technically challenged. If I am conducting business and the person is not using a company email it makes me stop and think about why they are using personal email for business purposes. If I ever saw a me@something.com I would be looking for a alternate email address.
This is just my uninformed take seeing as I don’t have a personal domain name but having an email address such as bob@bob.com feels a little redundant.
Actually I’ve just remembered I organised a domain name for my grandfather’s small business about 10-15 years ago that we decided was an unneccesary expense after about a year and dropped.
However I remember at the time when I was setting up his email addresses that “businessname@businessname.com” seemed odd to me. Prior to that his business email address would have been “businessname@bigpond.com.au” or somesuch. As soon as the business name was in the domain it seemed strange to have it a second time in the same address.
Ideally I think you would create a bunch of sub-addresses such as “owner@bussinessname.com”, “manager@bussinessname.com”, “accounts@bussinessname.com”, “sales@bussinessname.com” etc.
However if the domain name is your actual name the me@myname.com email address makes a certain degree of sense to me. Perhaps using “me” isn’t the best choice of sub-address however it does strike me as being better than bob@bob.com.
I’ve got my own domain name (with the relatively new .name suffix, since it’s just personal). Since my name is in the domain name itself, I suppose putting it before the “@” as well is redundant. That might be less so were there anyone else sharing the domain with me. Nevertheless, my fingers are used to the same (or as similar as possible) account name portion for many email accounts, so I tend to use that, even if it’s not particularly informative. Where I have sufficient control, I may add full name aliases even though they would be longer to type, in case that might be more obvious to another person. Heck, now that it’s been mentioned, I might add a “me@” alias to the one in my personal domain.
None of that is particularly egocentric, IMO; rather some compromise between my convenience and that of those that I might correspond with.
One of the domains for Apple’s iCloud based mail has long (since 2008 or so) been me.com; maybe that’s where the idea came from?
In general, I can find no standard for how to form email addresses. It seems reasonably common to have the account name (short and unique across an administrative span of control) be one, perhaps more resistant to name changes; and firstname.lastname as an alias, provided that doesn’t collide. But there is absolutely nothing beyond organizational standards that would require that. Some email aliases (abuse@domain.com, webmaster@domain.com, etc) are more or less standard, but those are for functions, not people.
The firstname.lastname form is easy…to western eyes only. Even presupposing the courtesy of a single communicator making life as easy as possible for multiple recipients ( a couple more minutes spent on clarity for a message to 100 people saves time!) , to respect their time, the notion of what’s easy is audience-sensitive; for worldwide audiences, there probably is no universally easiest answer.
In the cited case, I’m not sure whether there is any correlation between attitude issues and the email address, although I can certainly understand the temptation to perceive such a linkage. 🙂
Some of it is the ‘Me’ generation for sure, but Vanity Domains have been around for years. I believe vanity email is a more recent development.
Some of it is the changing nature of the job market, and the related fact the younger generations often work several jobs – often freelancing.
Each freelancer is their own brand in that regard. Add in the ‘bring your own tech’ of some businesses/industries, and the vanity domain/email server becomes arguably necessary to maintain ‘your brand’.
I used to have a free DNS address in some other domain, something like mysystem.homedns.org, but that stopped being free. Didn’t cost much extra to have my own domain rather than a single name in some other domain, and it gives me more options for how I can set things up, esp. when it comes to getting back to my home systems from elsewhere. It’s simply more useful to have a domain with my name than to have one for something I make up that has no particular meaning to anyone.
I’m retired, and have nothing to sell or persuade anyone of. So I simply see it as something functional related to long work experience and hobby.
In many organizations that I’ve worked at in my capacity as an IT support person, usernames are often either “firstname.lastname@company.com/org/etc.” or the first letter of the first name.lastname.com/org/etc. This is of course done for administrative reasons and I suspect that as in my case many people just use it in personal use so as to have one less login name to remember. (and often password as well, though this is a poor security practice)