It used to be fairly common in manufacturing and retail, where you might have a line on an invoice stating: 12 widgets @ £12ea Having seen that usage (coming

It used to be fairly common in manufacturing and retail, where you might have a line on an invoice stating: 12 widgets @ £12ea Having seen that usage (coming from a family that ran a small business), the email address notation made sense straight away. On the other hand, I probably pronounced the dot in ".com" as "point" at least once, before hearing it read aloud by someone else.