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A comment on [email protected]. Parent comment

Re:[email protected] by cestith on Monday September 28, 2020 @10:27AM (#24616933)
'@' was used to mean 'at' or 'each' for a long time before email addresses. Often in pricing. '12 @ $3' means twelve units priced at $3 each. It's referred to sometimes as 'commercial at', including its Unicode name.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/At_sign

It was used as 'at' in computing in Algol 68 where it was a shorthand for a keyword 'at'. It has a different application as 'at' in Dyalog APL.

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Re:[email protected] by CydeWeys on Monday September 28, 2020 @01:57PM (#24619431)
It wasn't remotely as familiar to a broad audience back then as it is now, though. Considering that people accept its non-idiomatic use for website user names even now (which is the same as what I'm proposing no less), I don't think this would be a problem.
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Re:[email protected] by cestith on Wednesday October 07, 2020 @10:25AM (#24708549)
Using your example with left-to-right domains and needing a delimiter, one could build a URL structure for mail that changes the protocol but not the path.

https://com.google. for the main page

https://com.google.mail for gmail

https://com.google.mail/localpart for one's own gmail account

mail://com.gmail/localpart to send mail to what is currently [email protected]

Alternately, we could continue to use '@' and put the localpart first. The URL method of specifying a username or username and password does this for HTTP/HTTPS.

http://username:[email protected]/login

And currently we use mailto:[email protected] but we could use mailsend:[email protected] instead.

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