Friday, January 15, 2010
Know What Your Email Address Says About You
Lifehacker: "Earlier this week we asked you what your email prejudices were. We dug through the comments, and now we're back to highlight how you feel about certain email addresses and what they say about the people who use them."
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9 comments:
Looking at some of the points seemed like common sense, such as getting rid of the cutesy name for a more professional one. It never did occur to me that having an aol.com account said "Hi. I'm from 1996. What is this internet you speak of?" but it makes a lot of sense. Throughout the article I kept looking for my email provider, gmail.com, but there was nothing. I hope gmail.com doesn't say anything to nasty about me.
AOL, Hotmail, and a dozen other domains all seem to give the impression of someone not serious about things, but years ago they were very different, it was more likely (at least before 1993 or so when AOL opened things up to the internet for all of it's subscribers) that someone with an AOL email address was a person who went out on their own to arrange for email. Now it's someone who probably started with AIM and got an address on AOL to go along with their aim.com address, so probably a teenager. What will gmail look like to someone 10 years from now?
Maybe it's part of growing up in internet based generation, or maybe is thanks to some computer class I had while growing up, but I've always tended to use multiple emails for various things. As the article mentions, I have a aol.com email for when websites want an email address and I don't trust the site, I have two .gmail accounts (one of work, and one for general use), and I even have one linked to a website I worked on for a while. I guess I just always thought that when it came to something like email, you had to distinguish and label accordingly depending on the use you had for it.
They should also mention that most terms of service for webmail services (notably hotmail and aol) forbid the use of their email addresses for business use. While they won't likely shut off your account for using it to receive emails for your company, they could. Now that would be even more embarassing.
I totally understand that a lot of emails look really unprofessional. I have my first email, and I hardly use it anymore. I think that old emails can send across the wrong message to an employer, that you are childish. For college applications I made a new email so that I didn't seem childish.
Even though we are all told not to judge a book by its cover, it's not going to stop any of us from judging people by their emails.
I definitely judge a company that doesn't have their own domain name, but not as much as I judge ridiculous user names. I created a new e-mail address when I started applying to colleges, because sometimes it's those small details that can shape others' opinions of you. It baffles me when people send business e-mail with such a clearly unprofessional user name; I suppose those people don't believe that that sort of thing matters, but there's a huge number of articles out there that assert exactly the opposite.
Before reading this i could understand judging someone who uses a handle like "sexkitten" (personally i think you would be really stupid if you had a handle like that and was applying for a job and dont deserve to get the job anyway.), but i didn't know people could judge based off of a domain. What i do is i forward my school email to my personal and have a separate account i never use for spam. After reading this I am definitely thinking about changing my email address for good.
I think it's definitely true that you are judged by what e-mail handle you have. I remember getting a new e-mail for college apps. I still keep my old e-mail for personal use to talk to friends and such, but now as I start applying for internships and jobs over the summer, I'm giving a different e-mail with my name in it order to look more professional. I think it's definitely something that people judge in a professional something and that should you should consider when giving out your e-mail to various people, including potential employers.
This article makes a really good point that some of my peers still really don't understand. I don't know how many resumes I've looked through and seen dancerboi3@hotmail.com or crazydiva223@aol.com and immediately circled them. I tend to judge people based on their emails. I'm a big fan of lastnamefirstname email addresses, just because they're so easy to remember. I don't buy people not wanting to switch internet service providers or change email addresses. Hotmail, gmail, and most other email clients I've seen have a general importing/forwarding option, so dumping all your old emails into a free online account isn't the huge deal it was 10 years ago.
I think it's also an interesting argument to make when speaking of school emails. My gmail has been on my resume for years, and not just because andrew.cmu.edu is a mouthful, but also because, while it's great I'm in school, it may not be the impression I'm going for. On the other hand, sometimes the school email is better to use, especially for education-related internships, or people you don't want to get ahold of you after you graduate.
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