Recently CNN had an article on what your email address says about you. They had some very amusing perspectives on email addresses, specifically who your email provider is. If your email address ends in:
@aol.com
You probably have the same e-mail address you had in 1997.
You also might be 70.
Fair or not, if you send an e-mail from an AOL account, the recipient is likely to expect it to be spam, a forward of some thoroughly debunked conspiracy theory or pictures of kittens.
@hotmail
Not much different from AOL.
Hotmail is another ISP that was huge in the Web’s earlier days but has lost cache among the technorati.
“It’s like a silly cat sweater,” she said, “Ironic on a hipster, awkward and anachronistic on a middle-aged housewife.”
Many folks in our incredibly nonscientific polling said they have Yahoo accounts, which they only use as an address to provide on sites they expect to flood them with spam.
@gmail.com
A Gmail user “most likely knows their way around a computer” and “when the internet stops working, actually tries rebooting the router before calling a family member for help.”
me@mywebsite.com
Owning your own domain name pretty much puts you at the top of the e-savvy stack.
No one will think you’re a rube when they get your e-mail. They may, however, think you’re self-centered. And possibly a megalomaniac.
Not that you care.
Work/school email
If you insist on using your work e-mail for all your personal messages, then people may make two assumptions about you:
1. You spend too much time at work.
2. You want everyone to be impressed by your @whitehouse.gov e-mail account.
And if you’re more than a few years out of school, dump the alma mater’s account. If you’re still using @harvard.edu 20 years after graduation, you’ll just be the digital equivalent of the middle-aged guy still trying to squeeze on his letterman’s jacket.
What email do you use? Let us know … and tell us if these analyses are any more accurate than a horoscope.
