--On Saturday, December 25, 2021 12:21 -0800 Randy Presuhn <randy_presuhn@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > Hi - > > On 2021-12-25 12:00 PM, John Levine wrote: > ... >> I get an endless stream of mail intended for people with >> names similar to mine who imagine that my address is their >> address. I don't see why the situation here would be any >> different. > > Indeed, even in the case of someone fortunate to have a > relatively uncommon family name, like me. It turns out there > is even another Randy Presuhn, roughly the same age as me, my > second cousin in Iowa. For my husband, with the exceedingly > common family name of Nguyen, there appear to be countless > collisions just within the context of our city, much less > world-wide. The considerations keep pushing in the general > direction of X.500, but we know how well that has worked out > so far... I've been trying to resist the temptation to make that analogy :-( Maybe worth remembering that, if one goes back several centuries and in relatively small communities, the reason for inventing what because surnames, often starting from patronymics, matronymics, village or country names, occupations, or other attributes, all appear to have originated from a need to solve the same problem at a much less challenging scale. And, since this discussion started with an example starting with "@Alice", I note that a conversation that includes both John Levine and myself requires extra qualification and energy (in spite of my having a family name that is probably less common than Randy's and the protection of a tradition that forbids having two living people in the same family branch with the same first name). john
