Recycling Email addresses

[TechMonkey]

Read an interesting thing I hadn't really thought of before. Someone asking about recycling emails and how people avoid it. The gist was that to prevent accidental identity theft email addresses should not be recycled as email is now used as an identity check and not recycling seemed to be widespread thing. The biggest issue that seemed to come up was a management position having the same or similar name to someone who fills a lower position after the manager left. I've never really considered this, except for one rare case when someone was receiving old correspondence from a company as they shared the same name as a previous employee.

 

Do others attempt to prevent this? I can't even think of a way to stop it other than unique emails using some code, but that wouldn't be friendly and you wouldn't be able to use any alias to make it friendly as that would defeat the object!

 

Thoughts?

[jthompson]

Our student addresses won't end up getting recycled as they contain a cohort component that's unique each year.

 

Staff addresses, we don't have a policy as such to prevent it, but we retain leavers' accounts for a time and would likely try to avoid any clashes with previously active addresses, even if it meant the new member of staff having some arbitrary number added. [email protected], for example.

[pete]

We try to avoid it so we're not inflicting spam that the previous person may have signed up for on the new person.

 

The old address is tagged onto the leaver's line manager for 3-6 months until all the useful things have been redirected.

[TwistedHelixis]

[email protected]

 

On a side note, I read that it's not the best idea to use full stops in email addresses as some email servers ignore them and some don't.

 

Could just be my junk memory, so sorry if it is :0P

[FishCustard]

Never had it come up, but I would likewise try to avoid it.

 

I know that's one reason why some companies use "[email protected]" rather than "[email protected]", but IMO those longer addresses are unwieldy (and you could still get dupes with common names).

 

This is probably just me, but I would bend over backwards to avoid putting numbers in email addresses - I'd use a middle initial (if they had one) or some other disambiguator.

 

At one school we had a (names changed to examples, but the similarity was along these lines) - Alyssa Smith and Alexa Smith. We all mutually agreed on "axsmith@" for Alexa, and "aysmith@" for Alyssa, so it was obvious who was who. Given that one of them was in a safeguarding role, it was important that the addresses were completely unambiguous. Helped that they both started at the same time, didn't help that neither had a middle name to use.

 

Broke all manner of my scripts that relied on a certain username pattern, but that was good as I had to improve them!!

 

 

On a side note, I read that it's not the best idea to use full stops in email addresses as some email servers ignore them and some don't.

Correct - it's also pointless. Why make people type dots?

Edited July 15, 2019 by FishCustard

[psydii]

We never delete accounts. Automation ensures new accounts don't clash.

[jimmy_2k]

My previous school we used 3 random digits after student and staff addresses. You therefore couldn't tell if it was student or staff or accidentally recycle :-)

[jthompson]

At one school we had a (names changed to examples, but the similarity was along these lines) - Alyssa Smith and Alexa Smith. We all mutually agreed on "axsmith@" for Alexa, and "aysmith@" for Alyssa, so it was obvious who was who. Given that one of them was in a safeguarding role, it was important that the addresses were completely unambiguous. Helped that they both started at the same time, didn't help that neither had a middle name to use.?

 

We've had a similar situation, but we also had the equivalent of "asmith" already on the system, which made disambiguation a little tricky.

 

Correct - it's also pointless. Why make people type dots?

 

I think it's helpful to have dots to make them more readable. "johnsmith" doesn't pose much of a readability problem but "evanorton" could be read in more than one way. Can't say I've ever heard of dots being bad practice. Consumer Gmail will essentially disregard them in Gmail addresses on the receiving side, but G Suite will observe them as normal.

Edited July 15, 2019 by jthompson

[themightymrp]

We never delete accounts. Automation ensures new accounts don't clash.

 

We do something similar, but now I ask "how does this fit in with Data Retention policies"? Sure we could clear out the Inbox etc, but is there an issue keeping an email address on record of the lines [email protected] ?? Or am I stretching that waaaay too far?