Most companies use unique ID numbers (often 6 figures or more) my dad and i have the exact same name and work at the same company. my number is just higher because i joined later.

Required reading: Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names

Ask your HR or IT department. They are very creative.

There can never be just one answer to this question, since (for one) it depends if the assignment of email addresses are done manually or automatically. And many other factors. It's easily handled though, since it is a very very common issue.

So it's basically the same for the English system even though it's quite a less common thing. No magic huh.

@TymoteuszPaul To be more specific, I'm trying to get rid of numbering system for identical names because I was afraid it may come off as rude since it's something that I haven't seen from a few English firms I worked with, as opposed to companies in my country where people are very used to it.

I would use the year of birth before using a random number. That way it's easier to tell who is who if you have john.doe70 and john.doe90. But off course you can still have collisions that way at some point you got to use random/incremented numbers. And some people may take offense in having their age revealed. Alternatively you could use the year of entrance into the firm

@A.bakker Your company uses your unique ID number for email addresses? That sounds extremely annoying.

@seg I guess birthdate is protected by GDPR

@Bernhard Döbler if you have consent by employees you can certainly do it.

@seg If an org is large enough to have name collisions to deal with, it is assuredly large enough to have employees who'd object to having their year of birth in their email. It doesn't buy a lot of disambiguation anyway - given that most employees will probably be within a two-three decade age range, by the time you have about five or six John Does the "birthday problem" says you're likely to have two with the same birth year. Instead of supplementing one non-unique identifier with another even less unique one, better just to go straight to something that's guaranteed to be unique.

FWIW: "There are known to be several hundred ‘twins’ in Australia who have the same name and birth date" One of the more challenging scenarios I've heard about from colleagues who worked in data matching is the case where a couple have twin boys both named "Mohammed".

From my experience: 'Badly'

Time for barcodes on foreheads

-I'll be in my office with Jack Daniels the whole morning and I don't want any interruptions. -Which one of the three, Sir? -None of them.

My guess is English firms deal with it in the same way German or French firms deal with it. (That is, in various ways).

@seg consent must be able to be withdrawn at any time without negative consequences, and anyway it is usually understood that you can not freely consent to your employer because of the implied power they hold over you. So no, you can not 'certainly do it'.

@BrtH your name is also protected information under the GDPR. Yet it's clearly ok and normal to put it into an email address. The GDPR doesn't disallow to use private information it just requires consent and it expects you not to use this information outside of the scopes agreed to.

@seg you wouldn't use 'consent' as the base to process a name, you would use 'legitimate interest'. Consent is the weakest of the 6 bases and should be your last resort. But it's hard too argue that using a birthyear in an e-mail address is a legitimate interest, because less privacy-invading alternatives like a serial number are available and commonly used.