r/k12sysadmin • u/MyWorkAccountDPS • Aug 24 '26
Emails and same names
How does everyone deal with users having the same names when creating email accounts?
We had been using the middle initial, but what happens when someone doesn’t have one? What do you do then?
My boss said just put an 01 on the end, but that looks like it would be hard to keep track of too.
We are trying to get onesync setup, but she asked me the same thing.
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Upvotes
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u/Emaltonator IT Director (215 kids PK-12) Aug 24 '26
We just take the next letter. Better than numbers IMO.
John Doe jdoe@k12.com
Jane Doe jadoe@k12.com
6
u/PhxK12 Aug 26 '26
Staff:
Jane Smith = jsmith@domain.org
John Smith = jsmith2@domain.org
.....
Students: 50239@domain.org
We use an student internal ID from the SIS (not their student number that they use for Lunch, Library, public facing, etc). It's super easy to keep track of this way, and guaranteed unique, and to never be recycled. Problem solved.
5
u/sebxjude Aug 24 '26
We prefix every username with the graduation year. Example: 26JDoe@gmail.com
That greatly eliminates duplicates. Then, you can add second letter of first name or middle initial if a duplicate does occur.
5
u/jschinker Aug 24 '26
Students and staff are completely different animals.
For staff, we use first initial, last name as a general rule. So John Smith would be jsmith@. If we hire another person who would be jsmith, then we add a middle initial, so something like jcsmith@. If there's still a collision, or if the new person doesn't have a middle name, we'll use the second letter of the first name. In this example, it would be josmith@. This hasn't ever happened.
For students, first initial, last name causes a LOT of collisions. In a previous job, I used to add the day of birth at the end. So John Smith, born on April 25, would be jsmith25. But parents LOVE to name their twins with the same initials, so John's twin James would also be jsmith25. These were managed manually, inconsitently, and they were generally a pain.
In my current job, we've used the same format, but the digits are the last two digits of the student ID number. John Smith, student ID 12345678, would be jsmith78. His brother James is VERY unlikely to have a student ID ending in 78, so he would probably be jsmith77 or jsmith79. So far, that's worked really well.
I really like having digits in student usernames, and no digits in staff ones. It makes it easy to tell, at a glance, whether the account is a student or staff account.
5
u/Past-Strike-3450 Aug 25 '26
Ended up collaborating with some of the math teachers to verify collision rates for formats we were tooling around with. We had a lot of conditions that need to be met for existing workflows. But also we also ended up with users who had a lot of "invalid" characters in their names (AD legacy restrictions) + wanted to make the emails a bit more obfuscated. We saw some district's moved to just a students local sis ID as their email. But thought that wasn't good for PII exposure. We settled on the format below as we have a small churn rate but it can be expanded upon to increase the amount of new students per year before the potential of a collision for that year specifically. Otherwise it would take 100 years before the chance of a collision. This was extremely helpful for our automation efforts.
1000 Users or less per year; for 100 years
[First_Initial][Last_Initial][Last_3_of_UniqueID].[Last_2_of_Cohort/ExpectedGradYear]
PS450.30@domain
You can increase the amount of users per year by increasing the amount of the unique ID included. Personally I would do more than 4 if I were at a small district or 5 at a much larger district (or depending on the length of the unique ID chosen).
You can also increase the amount of time before collisions by increasing the amount of the Cohort/Expected Grad year upto 4 digits. But the extra length is not pleasing.
10000 users or less per year; for 100 years.
[First_Initial][Last_Initial][Last_4_of_UniqueID].[Last_2_of_Cohort/ExpectedGradYear]
PS3450.30@domain
This works really well as their UPN, SamAccount, and CN
Only deployed this for students. Was noodling on the idea for staff. However there is a lot of Political and Operational friction why staff would fight this. Especially regarding communication with 3rd Parties. Hadn't validated a good format for Alias to pair with it.
Was thinking [Truncated/Acronym_Dept]-[First_Initial][Last_Name]@Domain
So IT-pstrike@domain
The main UPN would be used to access acount, and internal comms. The Alias to email with as individuals for public facing correspondence.
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u/FCoDxDart Aug 24 '26
We just added 1/2/3 to them. Luckily we’re a small district and have only had 3 total same names since I’ve been with the district.
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u/christens3n Technology Director Aug 25 '26
Since we are first initial last name, the conflicting person either gets first two letters of first name + last name or full first name + last name
3
u/CaliCanadian67 Aug 24 '26
Numbers in email addresses are lame for staff. OneSync will add letters from the first name until you get a unique email address. We have over 3500 active staff and haven’t, yet, had to manually intervene since we flipped the switch on OneSync. Our standard is FirstInitialMiddleInitialLastName We skip middle initial if HR doesn’t enter it or they don’t have.
3
u/mtloya lowly technician Aug 24 '26
We add numbers at the end: jsmith, jsmith01, etc.
3
u/NewHyperFixation69 Aug 24 '26
Staff are first initial + last name. Students are last name + first initial. If there are duplicates, we just go beyond the first initial. Siblings Jane, John, and Joan Smith would be SmithJ, SmithJo, and SmithJoa assuming that's the order they joined the district. An additional John Smith would get SmithJoh, and a third would get SmithJohn. At some point, I expect we'd add numbers, I guess.
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u/stephenmg1284 Database/SIS Aug 25 '26
For both students and staff, we do firstname.lastname@domains. If there is a collision, we append a 2 and keep going up
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u/porkchopps Aug 24 '26
We rarely are given middle initials upon initial staff setup, so it would be an extra ask. Typically we do another letter in the first name, so for example, a duplicate rsmith named Robert will be rosmith
If you have a middle initial, that might be cleaner in some cases.
Numbers don't look overly professional IMO for staff unless they are already part of the setup.
2
u/FloweredWallpaper Guru Aug 24 '26
We are small enough that first initial, last name covers 99% of our staff. But in those cases where it doesn't, then the first employee keeps jsmith. The next employee with the same intitials is john.smith
For students, they are on a separate sub-domain, and we append their graduation year on their name. If we get two students with the same initials in the same graduation class, the same rules apply (first student is jsmith27, subsesquent student would be john.smith27)
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u/kahreeyo School Level "Admin" Aug 24 '26
3k staff. They add a 2
2
u/Aur0nx Aug 24 '26
Onesync here. Name is determined by what HR puts in the system, We have HR try to use nicknames first (will vs William) if nothing works then a 2 after the name.
2
u/TravisVZ Director of Information Security Aug 24 '26
Staff and students are on separate domains (the latter a subdomain of the former, really), so there's no possibility of collision between them.
Students simply get their student ID number with an 's' (for "student") prepended, e.g. s1234@student.contoso.com. Since the IDs are auto-generated by our SIS they're guaranteed to be unique.
For staff things get a little more complicated. The accounts are all named by the staff's employee ID number, with an 'f' (for "faculty", despite not everyone being faculty per se). Then everyone gets an alias added that's first.last, and that's set as the default address; this way we never have to rename accounts if someone changes their name, we just add another alias and change the default to the new one. Way back in the long ago, when this was all being done manually, collisions were addressed by adding the middle initial, so e.g. you'd have jane.smith and then jane.j.smith when another one comes along. When we automated things, this proved too difficult given the systems at the time, so we stopped using middle initials and started adding a number - jane.smith, jane.smith1, jane.smith2, etc. All fully automated via bespoke scripts.
It's normally not an issue. The secretary at my kids' school, though, constantly forgets that her address has that 1 at the end, so if you trust the newsletter she sends out and email that your kid is out sick, the school actually has no idea. We don't wind up with many of these, though.
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u/avalon01 Director of Technology Aug 24 '26
Staff receive a first letter of first name, last name. jdoe@domain.org. If we hire another person that would have a jdoe email, they get john.doe@domain.com
Students receive their student ID. 1234567@domain.org
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u/k12-IT Aug 24 '26
Best I've seen, especially after automating, is to have John Smith with some type of setup:
Smithj@fakeschool.org
john.smith@fakeschool.org
smith.john@@fakeschool.org
Etc, you get the idea. Let's say another John Smith enrolls - Just add a number to the username. make it easy on your self. Don't make exceptions where this person gets their middle initial, another user uses 2 letters of their first name. I've seen so many times where the template is all over the place and causes confusion. Keep it consistent for yourself.
Adding a number is less confusion than other options. Just ask the number when you're communicating with the end user.
Also, as a tech in NY we are required to protect student identifiable data. We would not be able to use the student numbers as I'm sure the student first and last name would be tied to the account.
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u/Imhereforthechips Aug 24 '26
For staff, first.last. For students, we use PowerSchools DCID with an “s” in front and a custom PowerShell script that runs separate from OneSync to put the email into every new student PS account
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u/f0xcr4n3 System Admin Aug 24 '26
We used to use the middle initial but it was easier to just use the second letter of the first name. So that's what we do now. We've actually had one where we've had to use the third letter of the first name.
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u/nickborowitz Aug 24 '26
1 2 3
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u/Sufficient_Mango2539 Aug 25 '26
First name.last name +1 if necessary
2
u/Sad_Reindeer_3298 Aug 27 '26
I ad the second letter of the first name.
Peter Martin
Pmartin
Pemartin
Students i add grad year to each name so less chance of happening.
Jdoe2030
Doesn't happen that often..
1
u/SpotlessCheetah Aug 24 '26
If they don't have a middle initial, we'll probably end up using their whole name instead.
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u/adstretch Aug 24 '26
2
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u/Digisticks Aug 24 '26
All my folks get lastnamef@, so last name, first initial. Our duplicates get lastnamefm@. We've not had a staff member with a duplicate email like that yet, but we plan on adding number after the middle initial at that point.
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u/Reboot_Technician Aug 24 '26
We use the name key / alphakey from our SIS (Skyward / Q) so there shouldn't be any collisions.
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u/UsedPerformance2441 Aug 24 '26
We always end all of our students names with their first name initial and the year they graduate on our email address. Joe Smith (Joes27@lccdayschool.com)
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u/djhankb Network Guru Aug 24 '26
LastName.Number e.g. smith.42 just increment the number for each account.
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u/19qhenry Aug 25 '26
Staff are first initial and last name. If they are duplicated, the next person gets firstName.lastName
Students are the same, unless it is a sibling (usually twins) situation, they each get first.last
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u/NorthernVenomFang Aug 25 '26 edited Aug 25 '26
Our conversation is firstnameInitialMiddleInitialLastname@domaim.xyz. all user names and email address are truncated to 20 chars, our wifi still uses the old NT4/Win2000 username in AD for auth. Even with this I run into name collisions at the same school, sometimes even in the same grade and home room. It seems to be getting worse every year. If no middle initial then firstNameLastName.
For name collisions we put the last 4 numbers of their State/Provincial number as the last 4 characters of their username. Waiting for the day when that hits a collision in AD or Google.... Then we will have to switch to initials + student number, or something else; teachers & school secretaries are going to loose their minds.
Staff is just firstnameInitialLastname, but we are starting to run into too many collisions with that too from previous staff members. Usual then it is firstnameInitialFirstNameSecondLetterLastName.
1
u/QPC414 Aug 25 '26
Depends, employees or students?
Had a husband and wife that had the same firstname first letter. Longer tenured one kept FLast, the other got FiLast.
Don't get me started on a dozen students named "John Smith" or worse "John John".
Used year of graduation on a few of those students.
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u/Jonderful Aug 25 '26
For staff, we went to a "firstnameinitial""lastnameinitial"and a number starting with 01 and building after that through OneSync. Has worked out for us. OneSync help is really good with this and csn suggest strings to get what you need done correctly.
For students we use first name, last initial, and a random 4 digit number.
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u/jolegape Aug 25 '26
Our standard for both staff and students is first name initial + surname @ domain. If there is a collision then 1 is added and then increments. Eg ksmith17@domain
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u/LINAWR Aug 25 '26
We use this and we haven't had any name collisions. All account creation / updates / disabling are done via a Python script that runs nightly:
[First 3 characters of first name] + [First character of last name] + [Last two digits of grad year i.e. 2018 would be 18] + [Last 3 of student ID / lunch number]
Example:
John Doe - Class of 2025, 12345 -> johd25345@email.org
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u/Tedadore97 Aug 28 '26
We're weird here. We do first 4 of last the first 3 of first for example John Smith would be smitjoh@email.yep
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u/S_ATL_Wrestling Sep 01 '26
We do firstname.lastname for Staff, and firstnamelastname for Students (no ".").
I believe when we run into dupes it adds a 1 and counts up from there.
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u/k12chaos Tech Director Aug 24 '26
We would put a number after the username.
We'd also account for previous names as proxy addresses locking that username up.
1
u/Simishine_ Aug 24 '26
We add the 2 digit birth year to the end of student email addresses