please help me convince my mother she is wrong

October 18, 2008 9:03 AM

My mom has asked me to help her add an email address to her contact list. She insists that part of the address is underlined; something like [e-mail]. She asked the recipient and he confirms that this is correct. Is this actually possible? If it is possible, how can it be done? I've tried copy & pasting but that hasn't worked. (Using Safari on Mac OS X Leopard, with Yahoo! email)
posted by you zombitch to Computers & Internet (12 answers total)

I've never heard of an underlined email address and really, really doubt that it's true.

Try sending an email to the non-underlined address ([e-mail]) and see if it gets there.
posted by DMan at 9:09 AM on October 18, 2008

Best answer: ... or [e-mail]. When spoken, people say "john underline doe."

I never ever ever have heard of an email address having underlined characters, because there is no way to make that happen.
posted by Fuzzy Skinner at 9:12 AM on October 18, 2008 [2 favorites]

I suspect she means [e-mail]. Actual underlining is impossible because of the way the protocol works.
posted by nasreddin at 9:14 AM on October 18, 2008

Best answer: It's not possible. Period. End of story. She can read this if she wants to debate the point.

What's more likely is that there's a failure to communicate. An address like [e-mail] is entirely feasible, and it seems likely that it's something like this at work. That "_" is correctly referred to as an underscore.
posted by adamrice at 9:15 AM on October 18, 2008 [4 favorites]

The spec doesn't permit an underlined character. Much more likely is John's email address is [e-mail]
posted by Mitheral at 9:15 AM on October 18, 2008

PS: The Solution? Have John email her and then grab the address from the sent-by or reply-to field.
posted by Mitheral at 9:22 AM on October 18, 2008

It's possible that there's an ampersand in the address, I think. Ampersand is the Windows UI shortcut for underlining a character, as in accelerator keys. File is &File somewhere in the code, for example. If he's using some crap mail program to access his mail, it's entirely possible that it's rendering his e-mail with underlined characters.
posted by sonic meat machine at 9:29 AM on October 18, 2008

Response by poster: Ah, I hadn't thought that people might say "underline" when they mean "underscore." That makes sense. I will probably have him email her anyway, just in case. Thanks for clearing that up!
posted by you zombitch at 9:32 AM on October 18, 2008

Yes, the proper form is to say "underscore" but I've heard enough people say "underline" to figure that was a possibility. Indeed it sounds like a verb in that context: "underline doe."
posted by Fuzzy Skinner at 10:05 AM on October 18, 2008

It occurs to me that it might be [e-mail], since some programs will turn that underscore-on-each-side formatting into underlined text.

It's not as likely, though.
posted by genghis at 10:39 AM on October 18, 2008

Is it also possible that whatever program she's looking at is underlining the text as part of some kind of spell check or address auto-complete or something? Actual underlining in an email address is impossible but that doesn't mean some program won't use it as a UI cue for something.
posted by scarabic at 10:48 AM on October 18, 2008

Response by poster: Followup: it turned out that the person giving the address had said "underline" rather than underscore, so the address was john_doe.
posted by you zombitch at 1:16 PM on November 22, 2008