In case I'd avoid it. If you have an employee named Susan Sarandon it's probably better to choose [email protected] for the eMail. But that's completely opinion based.

Not related to German language, but your company/admins should think of changing the address format in a way it is a) still unique & unambiguous when there are more employees and b) more informative about who is actually mailing.

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Off-topic here - but the abbreviation is too short from the point of view of long-term administration. What will happen if an e-mail address has to be generated for the employee Steven Starr and Susan Sarandon?

Call it ß instead ...

Better debate to use clever addresses with at least a part of a name in them. Imagine you are told someone's 2-letter address, would that make a good impression to you?

What's wrong with [email protected]? That's pretty idiomatic in many workplaces and is much more human-friendly. Extra letters don't cost anything in an email address. Besides, once your company grows past about 15 people you're going to start having more than one person with the same initials. Are you trying to confuse everyone with this scheme?

Just to confirm the statements so far - SS is for Schutzstaffel and is definitely an issue here in Germany, though I am not saying this email adress necessarily would be. Many rightwing extremists are using this abbreviation in various forms, such as tattoos and this kind of mark is rather recognizable here. You may compare it to an adress using [email protected], when you are Klaus-Kunibert Knorr. May not be an issue in business, but the abbreviation is definitely recognized in the respective country.

This also won't be the only case of an awkward email address - consider hi@ (...bye?), bo@ (need a shower?), fu@ (pardon me?), dr@ (are they a doctor?), ho@ (santa? bawdy house?), aa@ (lava? just lazy?), ko@ (are we boxing?), ky@ (isn't that a bit personal?), pa@ (company's dad?), yo@ (homie?)... etc

Not a problem - SS is too short and common. It will be bad choice if your email is NSDAP@

@puck: The initials are a "part of a name". But that notwithstanding, in my experience, "important" people in an organization often have shorter addresses (this may have to do with those important people also happening to be in the organization for a long time, in particular, having received their account IDs at a time when short IDs were still sufficiently unique). Therefore, in practice, when I'm told someone's 2-letter address, that typically makes an excellent impression to me and tells me one of the higher-ups is servicing my request. The shorter, the better.

@Mär It might also be a problem in France, where licence plates can't figure the combination SS for instance. I would wager this would be problematic in other European countries as well.

"germans, as they would be offended by the email address." It's rather the victims of Germans and other nations active in (WW2) SS who would/might be offended. Germans might be ashamed.

[email protected] could work too

I had a colleague whose name was shortened to GVD. That made it to papers and all kind of semi-official documents. In Dutch, that's an unfortunate abbreviation.

Add some suffix, like "ss88", and be done.

@J...: There's also bs@, which I've seen used by C++ designer Bjarne Stroustrup.

Since you seem to care about not offending: What is "real German"?

Any two letters are an acronym for something which could be offensive or inappropriate.

To the people who are saying it's just wrong to have short email addresses - as someone who has a really long name, I can tell you it's soooo nice to have 2 letter mail address. Invariably if I give people a long email address over the phone, which I do daily, they'll get it wrong 9 out of 10 times.

no love for ß@example.com?