Corporate Email & Username Generator

Joining two names is the easy part

Every company has a pattern, first.last or first initial and surname, and applying it takes a spreadsheet formula. What goes wrong is everything around the formula, and none of it produces an error. It produces an address that looks fine until somebody uses it.

An address that used to belong to somebody else

Give a new starter the address of somebody who left last year and they inherit that person’s mail: supplier invoices, messages from customers who never heard the news, and password resets for every outside service the previous owner signed up to with it. Nobody has to attack anything for that to leak.

So the tool asks for the addresses already in use, and the ones that belonged to people who have gone, and nothing on that list is ever handed out again. If the list is missing, it says so before anything else.

Two John Smiths, and a name cut to fit

Two people with the same name get different addresses: the first in the file keeps the plain one, the next gets a middle initial if the pattern has room for one, then a number. Windows logon names stop at twenty characters, so a long name is shortened, and the shortened form can clash with somebody whose full name never did. Every check runs after cutting, and the number always survives the cut.

Names in every alphabet

Accents and special letters are reduced the way most mail systems expect, so José becomes jose and Strauß becomes strauss, and the person’s name in your HR system is left exactly as it is. A name written in a script with no single agreed spelling in Latin letters is not guessed at. The row is set aside with a note to ask the person, because a machine’s romanization of somebody’s name is not theirs to be issued without being asked.

An initial and a surname can spell a word

Patterns that join pieces of a name with nothing between them can produce a word nobody would choose to be given. The tool flags a word that appears only across the join, and leaves alone any word that is simply part of somebody’s own name. It says only that the address spells a word, not which, and sends the row to a person.

Choosing a pattern

Every pattern is scored against your list: how many people would share an address with somebody earlier in it. Patterns built from initials run out of room fastest, and every clash is somebody with a number in their address for as long as they work for you.

What this does not do

It creates nothing. It produces a list for a person to check and for your directory to import, with the rows that need a decision listed first. For names that arrive as one column in several formats, the Employee Name Splitter does the splitting properly and says which names it cannot vouch for.