Mailaddresses

Over the last two decades, email has evolved to be one of the primary ways business people communicate. That makes having a good email address all the more necessary. That Hotmail email address you chose when you were in junior high school–something like “Offspring4EVER,” probably–isn’t really what you want on your business card, even if Smash was one of the best albums of 90s. Fortunately, it doesn’t take most of us long to realize that a proper email address is part of growing up, just like deleting all those embarrassing Facebook photos from spring break.

Unfortunately, it looks like not everyone got that memo (maybe it’s in the spam folder), which prompted iResearch to take a poll of 100 Japanese men to find out more about Japan’s embarrassing mail addresses.

While the sample size is definitely a bit small to get a really accurate look at email addresses in Japan, the results of iResearch’s poll were amusing nonetheless. To begin with, the poll asked if the respondents knew anyone with kirakira email addresses–in this case kirakira, which usually means “sparkling,” implies unnecessarily extravagant or showy, like kirakira names. 54 percent of the men responded that they didn’t know anyone with such addresses. Which, of course, means that 46 percent interacted with at least one person using a potentially silly email address.

The men polled were in their 20s and 30s, which obviously further limits the scope of the results–we suspect that the answers might be different for Japanese guys still in high school! So, what were the most common types of email addresses the men had seen? Take a look below!

Mr_Pipo_internet.svgWikipedia (Nevit Dilmen)

  • The most common kirakira email address types

1) Person’s own nickname (28%)
For example, people might use the nickname their friends call them by–such as “tacchan@” for “Takuya” or “earbiter@” for Mike Tyson.

2) Something related to fantasy (13%)
This was the one that most surprised us on the list–apparently fantasy is more popular than we had expected. Examples of kirakira email addressed here were “pegasus@” and “legend-dragon@”. Which aren’t as bad as “smaugishot@”, we suppose.

3) Boyfriend/girlfriend’s name (11%)
This one was bound to show up somewhere, though it certainly does induce a groan or twelve. People apparently use things like: “miyuki-forever_love@” and “mariko-aishiteiru@”. In case you haven’t watched any overly melodramatic anime recently, “         aishiteiru” means “I love ____.” Thanks for sharing.

4) Full (or partial) sentences (10%)
This one is pretty self-explanatory except that it leaves us wondering why. One example here was the bizarre “onaka_hettayo@”, which means “I’m hungry”.

5) Codes (9%)
The final kirakira email address type in the top five was “codes,” like riddles. We’re not sure why anyone who doesn’t work for the NSA would choose this, but the example given was “enetihsukoruotuseroda@”, which is actually “Adoresu touroku shite ne” backwards and means “Please add my address to your contacts.”

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Some of these types are actually kind of understandable–using a nickname would certainly make it easier to remember the email address. However, the respondents were none too fond of many of the other types. In particular, the use of a boyfriend/girlfriend’s name was thought to be extremely embarrassing, since it made the user look either very immature or very stupid (“What if they break up?”). The fantasy type was second more embarrassing type, since it made the user look as if they were “caught up in their own world.” Interestingly, email addresses that used sayings or poems were ranked as the number three most embarrassing, for the same reason as the fantasy types.

While we can certainly understand wanting to have an email address that really suits you, we suppose having something a bit more neutral is useful for interacting in the world as an adult. That said, we don’t think there’s anything wrong with having an email address just for friends either. That way you can be both JoeBoring@work.com and DragonSlayer69@hotmail.com!

Sources: Hachima kiko, Web R25
Feature image: RocketNews24