Are hyphens bad in an e-mail address?

[Ambrosia7177]

I am creating a theme based email for work, and it is a phrase I like, and it seems to me it would be easier to read if it had hyphens in it.

Are hyphens in an e-mail address evil?

As a for instance...

eat-greens-and-live-long@mail.com

saving-the-planet@mail.com

mac-user-for-a-green-world@mail.com

Thoughts?

 

[Apple_Robert]

Not evil. It would be better to use periods (saving.the.planet@mail.com). That is more formal.

 

[TiggrToo]

I am creating a theme based email for work, and it is a phrase I like, and it seems to me it would be easier to read if it had hyphens in it.

Are hyphens in an e-mail address evil?

As a for instance...

eat-greens-and-live-long@mail.com

saving-the-planet@mail.com

mac-user-for-a-green-world@mail.com

Thoughts?

I’d say they’re pointless in this context because the names are way too long and give you nothing back.

I brought my last name as a .name address so I use first@last.name

For my business it’s just first.last@domain.com

Short, simple, to the point.

 

[Analog Kid]

I am creating a theme based email for work, and it is a phrase I like, and it seems to me it would be easier to read if it had hyphens in it.

Are hyphens in an e-mail address evil?

As a for instance...

eat-greens-and-live-long@mail.com

saving-the-planet@mail.com

mac-user-for-a-green-world@mail.com

Thoughts?

I know that pluses '+' have special meaning, but I think hyphens are ok. Personally I prefer hyphens to underscores (less shift key gymnastics). Periods '.' are also common.

 

[D.T.]

You know, while email addresses aren't case sensitive, you can still write them in a specific case to add a little readability, i.e. ...

EatGreensAndLiveLong@mail.com

Use that as the reply to, on sites, the .sig in any correspondence.

 

[KALLT]

Hyphens are technically allowed, but it may depend on the email provider on whether you can register one.

I know that pluses '+' have special meaning

Indeed, some email providers use them for aliases. But that’s an implementation detail.

 

[Ambrosia7177]

I’d say they’re pointless in this context because the names are way too long and give you nothing back.

I brought my last name as a .name address so I use first@last.name

For my business it’s just first.last@domain.com

Short, simple, to the point.

I'm asking in the context of using a free email service like hotmail, gmail, yahoo, etc.

I just want to create an email for a specific purpose, and would like create a meaningfull handle, and when I concatenate several words together it seems like it is harder to read.

That is why I thought hyphen might help.

(*Note: I am NOT asking about a domain name, where hyphens would indeed be evil!)

 

[TiggrToo]

I'm asking in the context of using a free email service like hotmail, gmail, yahoo, etc.

I just want to create an email for a specific purpose, and would like create a meaningfull handle, and when I concatenate several words together it seems like it is harder to read.

That is why I thought hyphen might help.

(*Note: I am NOT asking about a domain name, where hyphens would indeed be evil!)

Still don’t see them as useful. Perhaps 10 years ago, but not today.

 

[Ambrosia7177]

You know, while email addresses aren't case sensitive, you can still write them in a specific case to add a little readability, i.e. ...

EatGreensAndLiveLong@mail.com

Use that as the reply to, on sites, the .sig in any correspondence.

So that would help if I published the email - like on a webpage - or in a sig line in an e-mail itself, but the camel-case wouldn't come through when I send the email, right?

 

[Scepticalscribe]

Personally, I'm not a fan of hyphens in an email address; @D.T. & @TiggrToo have both made excellent suggestions as to what might work well as an email address without a hyphen.

 

[Ambrosia7177]

Personally, I'm not a fan of hyphens in an email address; @D.T. & @TiggrToo have both made excellent suggestions as to what might work well as an email address without a hyphen.

But what about my question in Post #9?

 

[Erehy Dobon]

So that would help if I published the email - like on a webpage - or in a sig line in an e-mail itself, but the camel-case wouldn't come through when I send the email, right?

You are some sort of investigative journalist!

If you type in "case sensitive e-mail address" into an Internet search engine such as DuckDuckGo, this article is the top result:

Are Emails Case Sensitive?

There is a lot of confusion over whether email addresses are case sensitive or not. Some say they are, while others claim that they aren’t. So, who is

www.techjunkie.com

Summary: the local part of the e-mail domain (EatGreensAndLiveLonger) is technically case-sensitive per RFC 5321. However, in the real world e-mail providers do not enforce case sensitivity because doing so would be impractical and supremely disruptive.

Let's say you sign up for a new Gdomain.com e-mail with TexasToast. Simultaneously, I sign up as texastoast, TiggrToo signs up as TEXASTOAST, and ScepticalScribe signs up as Texastoast. Technically those are four different e-mail addresses.

Then you give out your e-mail address for to someone to contact you. If they don't remember exact case sensitivity, their e-mail could end up in my new inbox, or that of TiggrToo or ScepticalScribe's new accounts.

Thus, the typical e-mail provider won't enforce case sensitivity and provide multiple case-sensitive registrations despite the fact that case sensitivity is allowed by RFC 5321. What they will do is allow the first person to register the handle and throw an error to all subsequent attempts to register a different case-sensitive variant.

Depending on their system, they may simply convert your camelcase address to all lower-case regardless of the effort you put into pressing the shift key twice.

You could have figured all of this yourself if you bothered to spend five seconds STFW and spending two minutes reading an article.

But it's 2020 where people don't use Internet search engines anymore and just want things spoon fed to them on anonymous Q&A forums without putting in a single iota of effort whatsoever.

Naturally a sane individual would want to verify my findings with their own research and analysis rather than blindly accept my statement.

Your call.

 

[Scepticalscribe]

But what about my question in Post #9?

I have answered the question posed in your original thread title; personally, I don't like them.

Visually, they look less attractive than an email address without them, and, from a practical perspective, the use of any sort of symbol will increase the chance that mistakes will be made when someone types - or tries to type - your email address, in which case, you will not receive it.

 

[Ambrosia7177]

You are some sort of investigative journalist!

If you type in "case sensitive e-mail address" into an Internet search engine such as DuckDuckGo, this article is the top result:

Are Emails Case Sensitive?

There is a lot of confusion over whether email addresses are case sensitive or not. Some say they are, while others claim that they aren’t. So, who is

www.techjunkie.com

Interesting link.

Summary: the local part of the e-mail domain (EatGreensAndLiveLonger) is technically case-sensitive per RFC 5321. However, in the real world e-mail providers do not enforce case sensitivity because doing so would be impractical and supremely disruptive.

Let's say you sign up for a new Gdomain.com e-mail with TexasToast. Simultaneously, I sign up as texastoast, TiggrToo signs up as TEXASTOAST, and ScepticalScribe signs up as Texastoast. Technically those are four different e-mail addresses.

Then you give out your e-mail address for to someone to contact you. If they don't remember exact case sensitivity, their e-mail could end up in my new inbox, or that of TiggrToo or ScepticalScribe's new accounts.

Thus, the typical e-mail provider won't enforce case sensitivity and provide multiple case-sensitive registrations despite the fact that case sensitivity is allowed by RFC 5321. What they will do is allow the first person to register the handle and throw an error to all subsequent attempts to register a different case-sensitive variant.

I understand this, but all of you are still not answering my question...

You could have figured all of this yourself if you bothered to spend five seconds STFW and spending two minutes reading an article.

But then you might run out of things to whine about today...


Let's try to get back on topic and actually solve the OP...


First off, I'm not worried about collisions, because they likely won't happen, and if they did, so what - this isn't for my business...


Secondly, what I was asking is how can I make this easier for the person receiving the email.

If I sent you an e-mail from, "EatGreensAndLiveLonger@yahoo.com", is that going to be of any use to you?

That is the question all of you haven't answered...

Q1.) Will your e-mail provider CONVERT the original e-mail address FROM "EatGreensAndLiveLonger@yahoo.com" TO "eatgreensandlivelonger@yahoo.com"?


Q2.) What will happen to - not sure of it's name - the "pretty" part of the email?

For example, e-mail clients let you do things like add "John A. Smith" to an e-mail of "johnasmith@mail.com" so people see the "Jhn A. Smith? in their e-mail client.

Is that maybe the way to help with readability?

And would that work if I am using a webmail account and the receiver has the same webmail account? (As in, not havings omething like Outlook.)


Q3.) Does any of this really matter from the receiver's perspective?

For instance, when people receive e-mails from friends, foes, or unknowns, it's not like they write the e-mail down on paper, and then type it in to reply.

Instead, you simply hit "Reply" and you're good to go!


******
It's funny when people in online forums feel the need to shame and label people asking questions as "lazy" when they inturn never really answer the original question.

Thanks for the convenient link above, @Erehy Dobon, you saved me some searching!

But all of that still doesn't answer what i was getting at in my OP.

Hopefully now that I have spelled things out for you in even greater details you can try and help me figure out the best approach...


It sounds like dots and hyphens and periods can create more problems than they are worth.

And if people can answer my questions above, I guess I can better figure out the utility of using something like "PascalCase"...

Or, as I hinted above, maybe I am again making too big of a deal out of something that most people don't really care about?

 

[D.T.]

@Texas_Toast

(or is that Texas-Toast ... or TexasToast ... )

Just circling back around, I see @Erehy Dobon has done an outstanding job of providing some very specific technical details.

One addition: If you supply a Reply To in your emails, that's basically meta-data in the header, and it will retain whatever specific string that's provided, so even if there's some case flattening at the email server(s), the recipient would see whatever case specific reply address you provide.

 

[Erehy Dobon]

Q1: Depends on the e-mail provider; you'll need to ask each and every one. Most probably won't do anything.

Q2: Sure, some MUAs (e-mail clients) will add a pretty name. It just adds another e-mail header. Most of today's MUAs will recognize this e-mail header and attempt to display it because it helps legibility for humans.

Q3: To some yes, to others not so much. You'll need to do a massive survey with a statistically significant sample size to get a trustworthy answer.

Having a human-friendly legible e-mail address is still worth something if it is displayed on the web or perhaps on deadtrees materials like a brochure, poster or business card.

Enforcing case sensitivity for e-mails would seem to be treacherous. There's a certain percentage of people who don't care much for correct capitalization and punctuation in their own writing and might be inclined to ignore it if they see it elsewhere.

In any case, you have much to do now with all of those e-mail service providers and users to interview and all of those e-mail client software applications to review, and all of those webmail services you will need to carefully examine!!!

Enjoy!

 

[Ambrosia7177]

@Texas_Toast

(or is that Texas-Toast ... or TexasToast ... )

Ha!

If you supply a Reply To in your emails, that's basically meta-data in the header, and it will retain whatever specific string that's provided, so even if there's some case flattening at the email server(s), the recipient would see whatever case specific reply address you provide.

What do you call the pretty name that I referred to above?

As in the recipient seeing "John A Smith" next to "johnasmith@mail.com"

I don't think that is the same thing as the Reply-To address, right?

 

[Erehy Dobon]

More unbelievable investigative skills!

There's a technical term for the pretty name which would definitely be described in the appropriate RFC. Rather than do the Internet search myself I hereby give you the privilege of doing this on your own.

It's actually part of the From: header. The official e-mail address lives within arrow brackets < >.

In Apple Mail:

View > Message > Raw Source

You are ON FIRE today, sir!

🔥🔥🔥

 

[C DM]

What do you call the pretty name that I referred to above?

As in the recipient seeing "John A Smith" next to "johnasmith@mail.com"

It's just the name that you set to be associated with your email account. The recipient will see that in their email client (the particular details can depend on how the client specifically would display that), short of them perhaps having your email address in their address book, in which case the email client might display it with whatever name they have you under in their address book. More or less how email in general has worked all along.

 

[D.T.]

That's the display name, generally you'll see the actual email address between <>, this can be automatically handled by some email clients, where they match the address to a contact, so you'll see: Guy Business <guy@business.com> and that's created from your email client based on the address and the "friendly" name you provide.

You can add this in programmatically, like in C# ...

MailMessage mail = new MailMessage(); mail.From = new MailAddress("guy@business.com", "Guy Business" );

So I suppose if you wanted to provide that as an additional sort of name you could do: Eat Greens and Live Long <eatgreensandlivelong@mail.com>
[automerge]1594832038[/automerge]
FFS, I had that sitting written and not posted and I'm late to the party again

 

[Huntn]

I'm asking in the context of using a free email service like hotmail, gmail, yahoo, etc.

I just want to create an email for a specific purpose, and would like create a meaningfull handle, and when I concatenate several words together it seems like it is harder to read.

That is why I thought hyphen might help.

(*Note: I am NOT asking about a domain name, where hyphens would indeed be evil!)

Periods appear cleaner than -s.

 

[Ambrosia7177]

That's the display name, generally you'll see the actual email address between <>, this can be automatically handled by some email clients, where they match the address to a contact, so you'll see: Guy Business <guy@business.com> and that's created from your email client based on the address and the "friendly" name you provide.

"Display name". Okay, thanks! 👍

You can add this in programmatically, like in C# ...

MailMessage mail = new MailMessage(); mail.From = new MailAddress("guy@business.com", "Guy Business" );

Right. Unfortunately that won't help in this case.

So I suppose if you wanted to provide that as an additional sort of name you could do: Eat Greens and Live Long <eatgreensandlivelong@mail.com>
[automerge]1594832038[/automerge]
FFS, I had that sitting written and not posted and I'm late to the party again

Yes, that is what I was thinking, or more specifically...

"EatGreensAndLiveLong@mail.com" <eatgreensandlivelong@mail.com>

Now per your earlier advice, I could also add "EatGreensAndLiveLong@mail.com" <eatgreensandlivelong@mail.com> in the Reply-To address to also help the recipient out.


Okay, thanks @D.T., for helping me to make a little progress!


Of course, unfortunatley I don't think any of this advice will help for this reason...

I was going to set up another ProtonMail account, and as far as I can see from my current account, there is no way to have either a "Display name" or a "Reply-to address" in ProtonMail...

*sigh*


(Side note: ProtonMail seems to be doing their damnedest to NOT become a successful alternative to mainstream e-mail providers with stupid, and I do mean STUPID, things like this...)

 

[C DM]

I was going to set up another ProtonMail account, and as far as I can see from my current account, there is no way to have either a "Display name" or a "Reply-to address" in ProtonMail...

Is there no place where you set your name associated with the email account/address? Seems like a fairly basic/fundamental piece of information that's there for any email account from any provider.

 

[Ambrosia7177]

Is there no place where you set your name associated with the email account/address? Seems like a fairly basic/fundamental piece of information that's there for any email account from any provider.

I do not see anything in my current ProtonMail account.

Maybe someone here knows something I don't?


Correction: I just found that I can set the Display name under: Settings > Account > Display name


@Erehy Dobon:
And when I Googled the topic of "Reply-to address in Protonmail" it seems that is not currently offered. :-(

 

[C DM]

I do not see anything in my current ProtonMail account.

Maybe someone here knows something I don't?


@Erehy Dobon:
And when I Googled the topic of "Reply-to address in Protonmail" it seems that is not currently offered. :-(

A quick search brought this up:

Display name and email signature | Proton

Display names and email signatures are a helpful way to provide identification and personalization to the emails you send.

protonmail.com