Email addresses and the abomination of a display name

A strong case can be made that various Internet standards created before the Eternal September, the commercialization of the Internet, the (once) dominance of Internet Explorer, … where superior to what came later.* One interesting counter-point is the “display name” of an email address, which has annoyed me for ages. This idiocy appears** to be present as far back as RFC 822 in 1982, possibly even earlier, depending on what implementations predated this document. (My own history on the Internet “only” goes back to 1994.)

*Of course, allowing for deficiencies due to a smaller amount of practical experience and a changing world.

**RFC 822 gives “mailbox” as “addr-spec” (i.e. a proper email address) or “phrase route-addr”, which seems to match the idiocy under discussion. Its 2001 replacement, RFC 2822, actually uses “display name” in its descriptions.

In effect, instead of using an email address like “john.smith@example.com”, senders are allowed to use e.g. “donald.trump@whitehouse.gov <john.smith@example.com>”.* Here “Donald.Trump@whitehouse.gov” is the display name, which has no actual impact on the email handling. Of course, John could equally use “Trump”, “Hillary Clinton”, “mermaid lover”, or “info”.

*There might be cases where additional escaping or use of quotations marks is needed. I have not investigated this in detail, and I deliberately do not wish to include quotation marks in the examples, even at the risk of a slight inaccuracy, due to incompetent handling by WordPress.

Here we see the first problem: The display name is highly unreliable. Not only can it be used to try to fool the email-illiterate user into making incorrect assumptions, but major confusion can arise when one party switches* display name between two emails, or when several parties use the same** display name. This problem is made the worse, because some email clients rely very strongly on the display name, e.g. in that only the display name is present in overviews of a mailbox (at all or per default). Indeed, even when the email address is displayed, the display name can make it less accessible, e.g. through pushing relevant parts out of sight.

*Say that someone started with “John” and switched to “John Smith”, because there were other Johns; or that someone went with “John Smith” professionally and “Johnny Boy” when writing his family, and that some recipient was both a family member and a professional contact.

**With “info” being the paramount example. In contrast, the email address proper is unique. (But note potential complications like equally ill-advised attempts to allow generic Unicode characters, which might cause e.g. an apparent Latin “A” to be exactly that in one address and and a Greek capital alpha in another.)

A particular complication is mailing lists: Because the sender determines the display name used for the mailing-list address, the eventual recipients can receive dozens of display names for the same mailing list. I can still recall trying to automatically put emails from one or two mailing lists into different folders at work—we were stuck with Outlook, Outlook only allowed filters* based on display name, and even with half-a-dozen alternative display names appended to the filter I regularly found emails that by-passed the filter… Of course, if emails to two different mail-lists used the same display name, filtering would be done incorrectly… (But, in all fairness, these were more Outlook issues than email-specification issues.)

*With reservations for terminology. I have not used Outlook in a good long while.

Another issue is that this feature is mis-designed (even its existence aside): now parsers need to handle two inconsistent formats, writers of emails need to understand two formats, etc. Indeed, because the display name can be empty, a parser needs to handle both “john.smith@example.com” and “<john.smith@example.com>”—and if faced with “john.smith@example.com”, it can only conclude that this actually is an email address (not a display name) after having noted that a “<>” expression does not follow. Absolutely amateurish… A better solution would be to put the display name in angle brackets, which allows for easier and more consistent parsing, and is less likely to cause misunderstandings (i.e. “<Johnny Boy> john.smith@example.com”, not “Johnny Boy <john.smith@example.com>”).

A minor potential advantage is the ability to replace a non-descript email address with something easier for the recipient to recognize. I note e.g. that my own first email address (provided by my college and based on my user name in its systems) was something like “f94-per@nada.kth.se”*. However, the advantage was very minor even back then, very few are stuck with such addresses today,** and that “john.smith@example.com” is named “John Smith” does not need additional mention. If worst come to worst, the (claimed) identity should be clear from the email body, even if at some loss of comfort. Schemes like allowing several people to use the same email account with different pseudo-identities are highly disputable, and it is better to either give them separate accounts or to not use pseudo-identities with the one account at all, because they are likely to do more harm than good. (As an example, a customer-service department should not use the names of individual co-workers as display names for one common account.)

*Do not try it. Chances are that I misremember the details, my last log-in was likely in the late 1990s, and I have no idea what my password might be—even should the account still be functional… The local part, should anyone be interested, comprises a program-of-study identificator (“f”, in my case), the year of enrollment, (a hyphen,) and some letters from the student’s name.

**Or they have only themselves to blame for registering using the likes of “ahf38js” (instead of e.g. “john.smith384”) when a name is already taken.

Unfortunately, display names see heavy use and I very often even receive email back, where my sender address has been abused as a faked display name (i.e. if someone uses just the email address proper, e.g. “john.smith@example.com”, he receives a “john.smith@example.com <john.smith@example.com>” back). This is utterly pointless on two counts: firstly, it adds no information compared to just using the address proper; secondly, it unnecessarily forces the use of one format when the other would have done just fine. Outlook, as already mentioned, seems to consider the display name more important than the actual email address. Certainly, the display names picked by the sender, especially in a commercial context, are often quite poor—as with “info” (why not include the company name?!?) and other very generic phrases.