E-mail Addresses

I posted on 10/17/03 about Ed Brill's (work / play) note stating that @lotus.com e-mail addresses had gone away. Well it looks as though we are headed down that path at the agency I work. The website addresses preceded the e-mail address change. Of course, even though the new standard is shorter and following what a lot of states have gone to there is still the administrative overhead of keeping all of the old addresses resolving as being in the government arena it would not be good to have citizens simply start getting page not found. Except for a few states that got .gov domain names prior to the Federal Government halting states access to them, most states ended up with website addresses following the form of http://www.state.(state abbreviation here).us.

Example:

http://www.state.al.us
http://www.state.az.us
http://www.state.il.us
http://www.state.mo.us

It was a standard that our state followed as well. Within the state the agency websites under the main state site followed http://www.(shortened agency name here).state.(state abbreviation here).us.

Example:

http://www.adeca.state.al.us
http://www.ade.state.az.us
http://www.conservation.state.mo.us

Since the Federal Government opened up .gov again many states have been converting to .gov addresses. Now the webspace address follows http://www.(state abbreviation here).gov. Many allow for the whole state name instead of simply the abbreviation.

Example:

http://www.al.gov
http://www.az.gov
http://www.il.gov
http://www.mo.gov

Our e-mail addresses followed the domain naming convention. Unfortunately the left of the @ symbol was left to each agency to decide. Many were firstname_lastname or firstname.lastname and some were even more creative. This made for an extremely long e-mail address:

firstname_lastname@(function).(shortened agency name here).state.(state abbreviation here).us

john_smith@mail.adeca.state.al.us
john_smith@mail.ade.state.az.us
john_smith@mail.dot.state.il.us
john_smith@mail.conservation.state.mo.us

The new standardized format will be:

firstname.lastname@(shortened agency name here).(state abbreviation here).gov

Example:

john.smith@adeca.al.gov
john.smith@ade.az.gov
john.smith@dot.il.gov
john.smith@conservation.mo.gov

The old e-mail address is to work for a year after implementation. I hate to think of how many places I have my old address (mailing lists, subscriptions, vendor contacts, etc..). I really don't think I'll have everyplace updated with the new address even in a years time. Oh well.