slartabartfast
My understanding is that "display name," i e the friendly name that appears in the From section of the email that is being read by your recipient, is not a part of your ISP's email addressing system like the email address (which must be unique for obvious reasons), but rather a part of the email message itself that your email reader program automatically appends to outgoing mail messages it is sending via a setting in the mail reader program on your computer. Instructions for how to do that should be available for your email program. What email reader are you using?

Your understanding is exactly what mine is, which is why I don't understand why they insist on making it either a required field that's unique.
 
That said, I wonder if I can just make it blank (one space, two spaces, etc.) and ignore it?

craigb
...
email address 1: Craig_B (The underscore symbol "_" represents the space) email address 2: Craig__B (with 2 spaces) email address 3: Craig___B (with 3 spaces and so on and so forth)

 
 
*Sigh* Not sure why I bother... 



It probably depends on the person that does their mail server. My guess is that they are a subbordinate for another (larger) domain of some sort, and what they can do is very limited. We used to have this issue at Millenium when folks would rent out one of the machines, that would be their domain. The software for that was pretty good, but limiting as hell, and there were password issues all over the palce in everything you could think of.
 
It could be also an issue as to how good the person doing this is. If things are that limiting, I would say he is not very good at all! But it can provide one extra step of security (hahahaha!!!!!) they might think!

I've been on the other end of that telephone conversation, so I have a lot of patience with and sympathy for customer service types. But I've been in your position too, too many times. It's aggravating.
 
But the real problem, as I see it, isn't poor customer service but rather our reliance on software in general and the too-fast pace of software development.
 
When software fails, the phone support person can't do anything about it except file a report. The people who manage software development see bug fixes and usability enhancements as a no-return expense and want to spend 99% of their budget on new development. It's new bells & whistles that sell software, not reliability or ease-of-use.
 
When my wife retired this year, I lost my health insurance through her employer and was mandated by law to buy private health insurance. A government website was created to help me do that. It didn't work. Here in Washington State we had our own software which was touted as a success story but it didn't work for me. It took three MONTHS of daily calls to get through to customer support, and after that they were unable to make one simple change to the database that would have solved my problem. They filed a support ticket and promised to call me back. They never did.
 
I don't blame the customer support people. Clearly, they were understaffed and tasked with "supporting" software that was poorly designed, too complex and hastily slapped together. Why doesn't your ISP let you use any display name you like? Because the software architect didn't think of it and coded an arbitrary rule requiring it to be unique so that it could have an efficient index in the database. Your poor customer service rep knows nothing of this and couldn't do anything about it anyway.
 

I was the lead of a tech. support team for three years, I'm very aware of how much fun that is!
 
My point with them, was that I recognized it for what it was, a requirement that shouldn't be a requirement and simply asked them to forward the observation along.  Instead they kept telling me what I already knew before I called (so it's probably my fault for trying to be proactive with them - lol).