Are you who your mail address says you are?

Illustration by Suneesh Kalarickal.

Trying to register for an online event the other day, I came up against an odd hurdle. It simply wouldn’t accept my gmail id, insisting I needed a work email. Now the thing is I only have that one mail id and being mostly unemployed, no office cares to include me in its mailing system thereby legitimising my digital identity.

Perhaps the organizers of the event wanted to filter out riff-raff like me, freeloaders who sign up for all kinds of events including An analyses of civil unrest in Latin America through the 18th century, in the hope of getting on to the sponsors database and being offered free tickets to the next event in Rio de Janeiro or Buenos Aires.

Or perhaps they found something particularly distasteful about my admittedly pedestrian web mail id. Webmail is somehow the pariah of the email universe. Recruiters, for instance, say they often don't open emails if they come from a hotmail, gmail or any other free account because of fear of being hit by viruses or other malware. There is also some kind of snobbery at work. Presumably, if you use free mail, you are most likely jobless which means you are pretty low in the corporate hierarchy.

I wonder, though, what’s the real beef against web mail ids? After all, between them gmail, yahoo mail and hotmail account for 50% of email users in the world. Webmail is convenient, easy-to-use and entails little or no technological finesse. It also offers decent protection against spam and viruses and enough free storage. Ok, it does cramp one’s ability to mail large files like the group photo from college half a century ago that’s been scanned, touched up and photoshopped 30 times. But hell, it is free!

My problem of course is that even my webmail is suspect because by the time I signed up at the end of 2004, the simplest combination of my name at gmail was taken along with all the possible years when people like me were born. In despair, I added an extra letter to my name, the choice of which in hindsight confirms what a kind school teacher once said to me: “you have everything going for you boy but a brain”.

You see from sundeepkhanna, I turned myself into sundeepkkhanna. Not sundeepzkhanna, not sundeepxkhanna but sundeepkkhanna! That one act of stupidity has thrown the thousands (okay make that dozens) of people trying to mail me into an almighty tizzy. The standard conversation following many such mails goes: “I just mailed you”. “I didn’t get anything. What email did you send it on?” Now the worthy at the other end has assumed that this silly fellow can’t even get his own name right and knocked off the offending extra k. The net result is somewhere on this planet one poor soul who chose wisely, is getting emails urging him to pay back the money he had borrowed or receiving entreaties from harried PR folks requesting for a meeting with their client.

Verily has it been said, we dig our own grave and we call it fate.

Thankfully, I am not the only one to suffer this constant indignity. Millions of people are constantly being defeated by this mail oddity. In fact, according to Tessian, an email security firm, in organizations with 1,000 employees, at least 800 emails are sent annually to the wrong person every year. That’s two a day. And the consequences can be serious. The UK’s Information Commissioner’s Office reports that misdirected emails are the number one cause of data breaches.

But there are worse consequences. The inability to be who we really are forces us to adopt identities that can cause major embarrassment if not downright harm. Think of the guy named Coron Andersen. Unable to get a straightforward mail id coron@whatever, he chose instead to add an extra a. All went well till the day Covid-19 struck.

The moral of the story is, choose your mail id carefully. Drunkgirl347@xxxx.com or rajnikantdonttakeshit@xxxx.com sound smart in some moment of weakness but they can cause serious damage in life. Sure with over 300 billion emails sloshing around in cyberspace every day the urge to stand out is strong. Resist it. In fact beat it down ruthlessly. Better it is to settle for the relative tameness of iamnobarackobama@xxx.com.