Because of the naming model I once got the email [email protected]. it was hilarious until we realized anytime I was attached to a group email, the spam filters would remove it.
Hahaha that's an awesome email. She should totally just roll with it. When saying out the email to people just deadpan the delivery for maximum effect.
Particularly bad since there are more flexible ways of creating usernames that can prevent collisions or unfortunate combinations.
In particular, firstname.lastname, with the addition of middle name first-letters if they exist. Sure, you can still get name collisions, but this method gives you a level of flexibility and professionalism that OP’s does not.
You can even partition people by function or position by using subdomains. So in this case, it could have been [email protected] such that they never are confused for anything other than a student.
Or maybe by campus. Or a combination of @position.campus.city.institution.edu, especially if we are looking at an institution with tens of thousands of students in multiple locations across multiple cities.
At our university, we give students a list of 6 possible usernames based on what's available and which algorithm used to generate the name. Work pretty well, and sometimes people get really cool ones. They can change their username between their choices at will, again based on availability.
This reminds me of the story I read once about Baseball Reference's old link naming structure.
It was similar to this scheme, but it took the first five letters of the last name, and the first two of the first name. There were variants and workarounds for players with the same letters in their name, and such.
But then there was the result for Jewish player Kevin Youkilis...