My ONE character email address

This one always cracks me up. I’ve owned my email domain, dtdn.com, for about 11 years now and for as long a period, I’ve had my email address the same. My email alias is a single character… C… just C… nothing else…

Through the years, I’ve had many an encounter where supposedly intelligent web applications simply refused to accept my email address, claiming it was somehow… invalid?! What???!!! For one, I was forced to stay with a single web hosting company for a very, very, very long time because most other hosts would not allow me to create an email alias that was just a single character. Now I know that I fly unconventionally sometimes, but I have one question about that?

WHY???

Just why in all heck is it that a single character email address is considered “invalid”? I certainly don’t get it. Who made that stupid decision? If I want my email alias to just be “C”, why can’t it be? As long as nobody else already has it reserved, why can’t I have it? It’s my domain after all right? Just doesn’t make any sense to me.

I was reminded of this “short sighted” nuance of systems when I went online this morning to Delta.com to check in for my flight to Raleigh, NC this morning. I wanted to forward a copy of my itinerary to my wife and Delta’s super intelligent system told me that my email address is… wait for it… INVALID… Supposedly, if I had an email address such as CV@dtdn.com, now THEN it would be valid. I don’t know who comes up with these idiotic ideas for what is a valid email address and what it not, but I would think, given the vast amount of domain extensions out there that if the address has at least ONE character before the @ sign, and at least one character AFTER the @ sign and before the dot (.) and then again at least one character after the dot, that should qualify as valid, don’t you?

Here’s a screen shot of the Delta message:

OK, so if you ever happen to be in a position to write a part of a web application that validates email addresses, please take notice… there ARE actually some people out there that use a single character as their email address and yes, these are indeed VALID email addresses… 

Cheers
C