joseph@apple.com

1 Infinite Loop

My e-mail addressed used to be joseph@apple.com. There was a joe@apple.com, but it was a honeypot; any e-mail received at joe@apple.com was automatically added to Apple's internal spam filter.

Actually, my real e-mail address was jmoreno@apple.com, but, since no one was using joseph@apple.com, I was able to get it as an alias. People were impressed when lowly me handed them my business card with joseph@apple.com, especially since I'd leave my job title blank.

Every few months another guy named Joseph would e-mail me to check to see if I was still working at Apple. I let him know when I left Apple in 2007 so he could be assigned the alias by the IT department (IS&T). For this, he was grateful.

Recycling the same e-mail address produced an unexpected gotcha. A couple months after I left Apple, the new joseph@apple.com contacted me and asked me to release the e-mail address from my LinkedIn profile. He was unable to use his new e-mail address with LinkedIn since it was tied to my LinkedIn account. This reminded me that all my personal accounts listing my old Apple e-mail address needed to be updated.

One nice thing about having a relationship with my successor is that, for the following few years, the new joseph@apple.com would forward me e-mails from my contacts who weren't aware that I'd left the company.