email naming conventions: a note about forename DOT surname @ example DOT com
Lots of big organisations seem to use a “forename DOT surname” format for their staff’s email addresses (e.g joe.blogs@example.com). It keeps the peace if, for example, they employ both Philippa Page and Phil Ippapage. Otherwise there would be a big fight over who owns the philippapage@example.com email address.
I do not think it is wise to use this naming convention unless it is really necessary.
I realised this when I was trying to download a complete backup of a website that was hosted on a Linux server. My local computer is a PC. My server was using omail to manage the email accounts which was storing data about each account in a directory called “users”. Each email account’s data was stored in a subdirectory of this folder. These subdirectories were named after the email account. So, data for the “info” account was stored in ~/users/info/.
This works fine. However, in cases were there was a ‘dot’ in the account name, the ‘dot’ in the folder name was represented by a “:” - a colon. I’m not sure, but I guess that, in Linux, dots are not allowed in folder names.
Now, on a Windows XP machine, if you try to create a folder that contains a colon - you will get an error message telling you that colons are not allowed in file/folder names.
So, when it came to download a snapshot of my “users” directory, every folder that contained a colon was not created on my local computer and, hence, was not backed up. In order to make backups of these folders, i had to create each one manually on my local pc (using a dot instead of a colon) and then go through the troublesome folders downloading their contents individually.
As I write this, I realise that some ftp clients may have a feature (that allows folders to be renamed automatically during transfer) to solve this problem.
In the meantime, I will make a point of avoiding non alpha-numeric characters in any email accounts I create.
A couple of handy pages for reference:
http://www.glindra.org/doc/filename.html
http://www.certiguide.com/apfr/cg_apfr_LinuxPathNamesandFileNames.htm