To think saying 'is that all one word?' when taking down an email address is pointless?

[TheGreaterGood]

Phone person: Can I take your email address please?

Me: yes, it's 'TheGreaterGood...'

Phone person: Is the all one word?

Me: it's an email address, were you expecting spaces?

Surely an email addresses is 'one word' - what on earth do they mean? Or am I missing something?

Yes, I do have more important things to worry about but worrying about trivial shit like this helps distract me...

Btw that is not my email, so don't email it.. (but if you do, for sucks sake put an 'S' at the end!)

*fucks

I give up.

I once had someone complain their emails weren't getting through (to the law firm I worked at). There was a section in our client care letter saying "Our email address format is "

They were trying to email using exactly that. Not the lawyer's name. Not my name (team secretary). firstname.lastname FFS. They can't've been the only ones because about ten days later a revision came to the client care letter template so it read "Our email address format is , for example " (the template filled the lead lawyer's name here).

i have just emailed myself putting fullstops into my email address (gmail) & it arrived. Mind. Blown. Every day is a schoolday on Mumsnet.

My maiden name rhymed with 'word' so I used to enjoy telling people my email address - which was just firstnamesurname@ - then adding 'all one word' as it was fun to say . Also, I was the only one in my organisation NOT to have a dot between my names so it generally needed clarifying.

While we are talking about this can I ask

You used to have to type http/www or something & then it became www. and now sometmes you don't even need the www.

Is that vaguely right?

I thought it did matter what case it was, so I still say "lower case", and I spell it, because my name is hard to spell.
Also it involves my middle name which could be a letter, iyswim.

I really must change it.

With the case question. There are sets of guidelines about email addresses that programmers try to follow when writing email server software. These guidelines state things like which characters are allowed in the email addresses. Weirdly enough they also day that the bit before the @ should be case sensitive, so [email protected] should be a different address to [email protected]. But in practice everyone building email servers thought that was silly and made things case-insensitive as you'd expect. But you never know there's nothing stopping someone who's feeling particularly pedantic from building their own fussy email server that follows the guidelines strictly - it's just unusual.

Wikipedia has a bit on the guidelines along with a bit on case: en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-mail_address#Local_part

Here's something to blow their minds even further: if it's a gmail address (not sure about other providers, definitely gmail), you can add as many dots as you like, it doesn't recognise them and it doesn't change where it goes.

Wow- that explains why I have been receiving emails for the past 4 years from a family which includes someone with the same name as me. My email is [email protected], and they've been emailing [email protected]. I have replied to them before to point this out, but the emails keep coming.

But how come I only get one email for her every few months, and always from the same family members? Does she not have any other friends? Does this mean she is also receiving all my emails too?!?!

Why would Google allow 2 people to have the same address if the dot doesn't make a difference? Or is it that her address is actually something like [email protected] and her family are all numpties?

So many questions!

Yes they are probably bottle_beach - or bottle.bleach or bottie.beach - they'll have a slightly different spelling and the emails you're getting will be mistakes :)