this question would greatly benefit from a Country. I'm like, Hell no, I wouldn't change my name for that. But other countries could be different.

Names like O'Neill, for example, are well-known to have an apostrophe, so if they want to change that to Oneill in the directory, I would just find that confusing and it would look like a mistake. Removing it for just the e-mail username, or just for a specific system (e.g. UNIX account), would be fine in my opinion. "oneillm" or "michael.oneill", for example, are common conventions that everyone understands as e-mail only conventions. I.e. your actual name is written properly as Michael O'Neill.

@Brandin Yes, this is how I feel also. I have no problem at all with the email address leaving out the apostrophe. In fact this is preferable. An email is just a convenience for contact purposes, like a phone number. It's not part of my identiy. I just don't like the idea of being identified in the company systems, with a name that doesn't belong to me.

@user1751825 I think you should make the argument based on the actual fact of accessibility. The fact is, that there are already people in the directory with apostrphe marks. So if someone tries to search for you in there with an apostrophe, they may not be able to find you.

Today's April's fools day

@BernhardDöbler I'd like to think they're just messing with me because it's April 1st, unfortunately that's not it.

Tell support that was a great April's fool joke, now they should make your stuff work

If it is about the apostrophe: that's an allowed character in the local part of an email address stackoverflow.com/questions/8527180/…

@BernhardDöbler it's always April's fools day in the IT.

related read that makes you think about it ....

According to RFC 3696 apostrophes are valid as long as they come before the @ symbol. Just tossing that out there as I don't see it mentioned elsewhere. Your e-mail address, according the internet standards, is perfectly valid.

@Steve yes but it sounds like the username for this timesheet system uses the email address and maybe that system does not allow apostrophe.

gdprhub.eu/index.php?title=Court_of_Appeal_of_Brussels_-_201‌​9/… -- "The Court of Appeal of Brussels held that data subjects have the right under Article 16 GDPR for their name to be spelled correctly when processed by a bank's computer systems."; unclear whether this applies to an employer/employee relationship.

Ask them if you should hire a lawyer to help them recognize your current legal name. You'll find out pretty quick whether it's an April Fool's day joke or not. If it's not a joke, you likely have a legal remedy that they won't like very much.

@Steve it may be technically valid but idk if you can expect most systems to support apostrophes in an email which in my experience is very unusual

They're lucky your name isn't Robert'); DROP TABLE students; It also means that whatever system you're using for timesheets is likely vulnerable to SQL injection attacks.

@Steve That's correct, and for the most part I've been able to use the email address without a problem. It's just this one timesheet system that seems to have problems.

@J... Here is the obligatory XKCD for anyone who never heard of Bobby Tables.

Just to put this one to bed. This has nothing to do with April 1st. As I mentioned, this issue has been ongoing since I started with the company. It just happened to be April 1st when I posted the question.

I would expect any commercially-available HR system to handle your name fine. Did they create it in-house, with developers that don't know how to handle strings? That seems like a bad idea.

Would it be difficult to have separate email addresses for work and everything else? There might come a time when you no longer want an employer to be able to contact you via email, perhaps even more so if they are not competent to avoid common database hacking methods (as already demonstrated by this employer).

@qwr I would absolutely expect all systems to support all email addresses which are valid according to the RFC and any system that doesn't is broken.

@DavidConrad Yes, it seems clear that particular system is broken. However the issue now is what to do about it. If it was a small company perhaps they could push through a fix. However the company I'm working for is a huge, with over 100k employees. What I find really ridiculous is that they're proudly promoting how diverse and inclusive they are, and yet they won't respect my desire to use my proper legal name, my identity, in company systems.

I wonder of they can (a) create your account using a version of your name without the apostrophe, thus creating a valid email address, and then (b) modify your name but not your email address in the system.

@KeithThompson That sounds like a reasonable solution. Unfortunately IT support at this stage being completely unhelpful. Just resending their original emails. Not looking for solutions to this at all. Just telling me what I have to do. I'm raising the issue now through other channels. Hopefully this will help.

@J... OP is also lucky their last name isn’t Null.

@user1751825 just to be certain, you are really using the simple single quotation mark ('), right? If the others have the exact character in their name and it somehow works for them, it truly is not your problem at all. Just pointing them to working examples would be fine imho.

@s.alem Yes, that's it. The issue with the timesheets I believe is just related to the email address. I'm being told though that they can't remove it from me email without also removing it from my name. I know there are people in the system who have somehow got an email without the apostrophe, but still retain it in their name.

> I've never been expected to change my name to suite some broken IT system before, and I find this quite unreasonable and culturally insensitive/disrespectful.

I completely agree.