I was at HBO during the AOL merger, and for a time my work email became gcanyon0264@aol.com, because AOL corporate email shared namespace with its customers, and my personal AOL account was… gcanyon@aol.com
I wonder where this ranks in the top 5 stupidest things I've ever heard. It's bad enough merging customer databases when two companies merge.
No other major ISP has ever done this that I know of. Likely because it's completely unnecessary. Who made this decision (and why weren't they fired immediately)?
Nobody. Going back to 1989 every AOL account had a screen name that was used as your login and your identity. Being an employee was just a flag on your account in the database.
In 1993 AOL launched its internet gateway that accepted something@aol.com and put it in your AOL Mail box. You could tell that someone was an AOL employee because a banner (I think it was) appeared at the top of the message telling you.
Some of the network engineering folks had real aol.net addresses, but I don't know how that was handled internally. I also think the Netscape folks eventually made enough of a stink to keep their previous email address too.
> Nobody.
This might be true for AOL; I wasn't there except as an early/beta customer -- something like 25% off their hourly(!) fees for life! :-)
But at HBO this was absolutely a choice. We had @hbo.com email addresses; it was a race among all the TW siblings who would jump on the @aol.com bandwagon fastest, and our CIO was eager to win that race: we were among the first to switch, and it was a pain in the ass. As one example, there was no good out-of-office functionality. I had built that for HBO in the mid-'90s on MS Mail for Mac, so regressing that hard was a bitter pill.
As another fun piece of trivia, I got one of the "blueberry"s -- a blackberry purpose-built to work with aol.com email addresses, and housed in dark blue translucent plastic instead of black. Good times...
I was always wondering about that; it seemed to me that it would have been free advertising to Google if their users had to write and say @google.com all the time.
Yeah, we weren't thrilled.