My Thoughts !

Last post was about naming conference rooms. Now lets look email ids. (Yes, I think email ids are also your name)

Unless your name is "Diguki Mabendra" or "Sukranthi Rakur", you can't get an email id in your name. So people become creative in creating email ids.

The first option people would try is to have prefixes. Eg:mail_pranni / mail_to_pranni / contact_pranni. If you had a little luck on your side, you might get it. All of these options were gone and one of my friend selected like this call_<his name>. He is still called as the "call boy" in our friend's circle. If you are running out of all mail_, contact_, call_ stuff, you can still try something like "please_please_please_mail_pranni". It should be available. If not look into the next one.

The next option is numerical suffixes. It will look something like pranni_2006 or pranni_1988, where the suffix would be either the current year or your year of birth. But the ugly thing about this scheme is 2006 doesn't have any meaning and 1988 means it will reveal that you are already 18 years old.

I've seen only two kind of people called with numbers. Not sure whether in real world it happens, but atleast in movies it does. One people who are jailed and people who send them to jail (our great police).

SI : "Yov 394, intha 567 thappichutanya"
PC : "ayyayo, 567 kitta thaan sir intha maasathu maamool ellam iruku"
SI : "Ada nee onnu. naa namma kaithi no 567 la sonnen ya, constaple 567 illa"

hmmm definitely they have some namespace problem :-)

For those who don't want to have any suffixes or prefixes still have a better option. Your short and sweet nick name (like "Bala") would have been taken by someone else. But not your full name. If that is also taken, try "firstname.lastname". If that is also taken then you can try out "firstname.middlename.lastname", there is least probability that someone might have already taken it. Unless you are really unlucky, you can settle down with this. So if you can't "Bala" you can go for "BalaNadarajaGurusamy.coimbatore.RamaKrishnaSunderesan". Only trouble with this scheme is that length of the textbox might not be enough to type your email id.

If you still prefer a short name, you can suffix/prefix your name with something you are passionate about. This idea looks good for "RajaCricket" or "PhotoPranni", but not "VikasCoinCollection" or "KumarCPlusPlus".

If you are tired of all these, the best way is to reverse your name and create an email id. So "Pranni" would become "Innarp". The name would look little odd, but this would definitely work. Only trouble is the reversed name should not be another name. Infact when God wanted to register his name, it was already taken and he even tried doG. But it was also taken. Don't wonder about who else has registered as God. My tech savy pet dog tried to register just as "Dog", since it was taken (there exists another tech savy dog), it reversed its name and registered. Poor God was not as techie as those dogs and knew about internet and email ids only a little later.

If all else fails, register a domain name and create an email id there. Eg: register "grprakash.com" and create an email id like "me" or "prakash". Well, the problem is availability of the domain. If you don't get the domain in your name, you have options. The first one is to have some prefixes like "visit_pranni.com". The next option is ...

Related links:
Whats in a name? Part III
Whats in a name? Part I