Something similar at M$, long ago.
I was a contract employee at M$ back in the late '80s. They had a corporate email system known as "wizmail" (I kid you not), and I was duly assigned an email username beginning with "c-". Other people had a similar prefix, as I noticed in recipient lists, while some had "t-" prefixes and others just some simple hash of their name. It was explained to me that "c-" was used to designate contract workers, "t-" indicated temp workers, and permanent employees had no prefix.
It wasn't always that way, I was told. It used to be that anyone getting an email account could request any reasonable username they liked, subject to availability. No prefixes required or even suggested. That ended when someone realized (during an audit, perhaps as part of email system migration) that because contractor's email addresses were indistinguishable from those of permanent employees, contractors were often kept in the recipient lists of email discussions that would wind up in sensitive areas -- strategy or product planning for example. Even worse, this extended to contractors being included in group aliases. IIRC (and I might not RC on this point), the error was compounded by allowing email users to have email forwards to their outside mail accounts. Many of the contractors had finished their contracts and moved on, but were still valid email users. Oops.
On a tangentially related note, but a story that should be recorded for posterity, while there I met the product manager for DOS at the time, DOS 4 or 5 I think. In the course of the conversation she told me there were parts of DOS that they didn't dare modify: they had lost the source code for them.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
