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How email addresses are composed
There are two parts:
- Your email name/user name
- mail/domain ID
Separated by an @.
User name
 | This is your own name, or whatever form of it you are using. |
| There are no rules as a quick review of your friends’ hotmail accounts
will reveal. |
| Organisations impose an order on their employees' email addresses. |
Domain
The domain is split into 2 halves
| Domains identify the organisation that manages the email account. |
| You can work out a lot about any domain from its name and the extension. |
| The domain can have several sections connected with dots, dashes or
underlines. |
| Companies try to register their names, universities their initials,
interest groups often spell out their message in the name. |
Then there is dreaded dot and the extension.
Extensions or Top-Level Domain (TLD)
These come in many sizes.
| The simplest is the 3 letter extension such as .com. These are
US-centric and are a legacy of the way the internet's parentage. But it is increasingly common to find a national extension. So .gov
or .org implies US based while .gov.jp is Japanese and .de is German. |
| These are the country code TLDs. |
| BUT rules are made to be broken and the rapidly sinking Island of Tuvalu
makes a good living selling net names with the .tv extension. |
Notes
| None of the above should be confused with the account name given to you by
the host. An account name is whatever the service provider chooses.
It might, or might not, resemble your email address. |
| If you get email from someone and there is no @ sign, they probably have the
same domain as you or you have copied it down incorrectly. |
| The email specifications allows emails to be case sensitive but in
practice email IDs are case insensitive, which means that you can use
capitals and lower case. |
| In the UK, Nominet administers the system
although some TLDs such as .gov and .plc operate under special rules. |
| Cyber-squatting has passed its peak. There is an appeal
procedure to force owners to give up names to which they have no sensible
claim. |
How to guess an address
Knowing this, you can guess the email of somebody who works for a firm or
organisation. Put their firstname.secondname@domain - then reverse the names if
that does not work and finally try using and removing initials. Have a look at
the organisation website which will usually reveal the company convention. If
they have common names such as Jones or Mohamed this strategy might not work as
they might have numbers added to their addresses to distinguish individuals with
the same surnames.
Unfortunately, the general public do not abide by any rules, so you will need
other search strategies to find those for whom you cannot locate through their
work.
Pronunciation
| The @
symbol is pronounced at. |
| All periods/point/full stops are pronounced dot. (Only
insane or perverse people include the word dot in the
address). |
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