Slashdot Mirror
Does a Lame E-Mail Address Really Matter?
theodp writes "Over at the Chicago Tribune, freelance writer Nancy Anderson makes an embarrassing confession. It's 2010 and she still has an AOL e-mail address. 'You've got to get rid of that AOL address,' her publicist sister told her five years ago. 'It's bad for your image.' Image, shmimage, Anderson thought. 'If I do good work,' she asks, 'does my e-mail address really matter?' Good question. Would an AOL e-mail address — or another 'toxic' e-mail address — influence your decision to hire someone?"
yes.
--
turdeater@sexual-perverts.net
I think it does matter, first impression is everything and people for the most part cannot look past the bad connotations that attach themselves to anything that we use to represent us.
but it sure will make you look a bit dopey if you're still rolling with hotmail or aol.
I see usa.net is still around too, I had one of those a long long time ago too.
Now if you're not rolling your own domain, gmail or at least a respectable ISP in the very least your co-workers will give you a bit of shit.
If it's a technology person, that's a red flag. I'd expect them to at least have their own domain name. It doesn't cost THAT much and looks far more professional.
Heck, even my cat has her own domain name.
If it's a non-tech field, meh, I don't care that much. But I have to chuckle when I see a small business with a website and their own domain name, but still using @comcast or @aol on their business card for email.
Influence? only if it was for a job requiring knowledge of technology. There are too many easy throw away hosts to crank out a less toxic address if you are in the know.
I would argue it depends on the line of business. It IT/Tech, someone with an AOL account? Yeah, i'd have to wonder about it.
Maybe it wont matter as much in a field that doesn't have a negative impression of AOL.
We have a consultant with an AOL email, and while the email address doesn't matter to me, the fact that he cannot receive PDFs (for whatever reason) blows me away. They always arrive corrupt.
Because then she could flaunt it like an, "I 3 NY" teeshirt, horn rimmed glasses, and fluorescent sneakers.
for me it would equal that she is not tech savy and her document would probably come written in Write for Windows 3.1
God's gift to chicks
They will make judgements based on email addresses. They may be able to rationalise them. The rationalisations may or may not make sense but they will still make judgements.
You can either change human nature or change your email address.
It will be totally retro, like bell-bottoms, hip-huggers, wide ties, and beehive hair-dos.
Am I looking for a Cobol programmer or a .Net developer?
It's not about the domain name. But, if people connects a domain name to a bad service or frontend, it surely will pass that image to others.
And perhaps even cool?
I don't know, I have my own domains. I don't use the sillier ones for anything remotely employment or business related. They get a laugh once in a while and I get the satisfaction that I'm in control of stuff. I recently gave up running my own mailserver from home though.
Domain? No. Username? Yes.
I really don't care if someone has an AOL email address, though I work in a non-tech industry, so it may be different for me. However, the username is important. Here in DC, if you're straight out of an internship and you still have an email along the lines of drinkingfiend01@gmail.com, that's a negative mark. Similarly, a friend of mine who works in HR in San Francisco gets resumes all the time with emails the likes of johnissogay@whatever.com. Yeah, it's SF, but that's still not work appropriate.
ACs are modded -6. I don't read you, I don't mod you, I don't see you. Don't like it? Don't be a coward.
I can recall trashing an email and resume from a mrsuperflyprofessional@(something).com. In most lines of work, you are selling yourself along with the product, and if you don't take the time clean up how you present yourself, then why should a business give you a chance to represent them?
I interview software engineers, and I will notice AOL, Yahoo, and Hotmail addresses for sure. I don't believe that these really influence the interview, but I can't help but associate them with some level of technical incompetence (especially AOL). The only free accounts I really expect to see any more are gmail.
I was talking to a company about a semi-technical consulting job and their CTO pointed it out. I think he was semi-serious. We ended up not working together. Of course, this was 10 years ago and I had and AOL address because of their big dial-up network. That made sense given that I traveled a lot. How hard is it to sign up for g-mail?
The right person can make it work. Obviously, if a person acts old and like they aren't up-to-date it will just concrete a negative image. The right person can make it look like they are intentionally being retro, and therefore hip.
It would certainly make a person feel the person doesn't keep up with the latest information. Ex: An accountant or a tax professional might seem less inclined to keep up with the latest changes in their perspective fields; at least in the eyes of perspective clients.
Having a funny e-mail address is not a big deal, but still it is a stupid thing. Suppose you know someone with his own business and he has very cheap/strange-looking business cards, as if printed on a cheap home inkjet. It doesn't really matter in this day and age, but still -- it looks stupid.
So if you have good qualifications, why in heaven's name would you have an e-mail address like blonde1223@hotmail.com?
Also, if you're an IT professional, you should know that it's really easy to get your own domain and link it through to a Google Apps account. I like it when people have a firstname@lastname.tld account.
8 of 13 people found this answer helpful. Did you?
I agree with most of these Anonymous Cowards here: it all depends on the job. If the job is technology-related, I'm less likely to trust someone with an AOL address than someone with a Gmail address.
Depends. I've done a good few external hires over the last few years, and while I'd never actively sift on the basis of e-mail addresses, there's no denying that an outlandish one can make an impact (and probably not the sort you wan to make).
I wouldn't particularly care about an AOL address. I don't honestly think that any address which conforms to the firstname.lastname@isp.com format (or any other varation including initials, dots etc) will set any alarm bells ringing for any sensible employer.
However, there is one type of e-mail address that does cause me concern. This is the obvious "naughty" one. I've actually seen job applications listing addresses like partychick33@... or drunkenmick@... These do not give a good impression. Is it unfair? Probably. After all, there's nothing wrong with going out and enjoying yourself. However, using that e-mail address for a job application does imply that you have a problem when dealing with boundaries.
To sum up; a potential employer is far more likely to be put off by what comes before the @ in your e-mail address than by what comes afterwards.
What's bad is getting a resume with something embarrassing before that @aol.com bit, like p4rtyg1rl69 or phillygansta92. (Yes, I've seen a few like that).
Yes,
It takes all of 2 minutes to create a gmail account and tht account can forward all of your emails to whatever email account you normally use.
Much like the clothes you wear to an interview and the layout of your resume you can choose how you want your email address to look.
And heck to be honest an easy to remember phone # will stand out just the little bit more than a tough one.
it's human nature
If you have a job already I don't think so, although if you are looking for a job having John.Smith@gmail.com as a email address on your resume is way better than having Hotguy81@hotmail.com as a email address on your resume.
Cannot find REALITY.SYS. Universe halted.
Hotmail addresses were fine. Until Hotmail was bought by Microsoft. Something about 'Resistance is futile...'
...say, a low Slashdot UID.
If I read a resume from someone with the email jsmith@aol.com, I wouldn't bat an eyelid.
If I read a resume from someone with the email buttsex69@hotmail.com, I would be concerned as to why they didn't bother to submit their resume with a different email address. It's not hard to make a free one with at least part of your real name, and it shows professionalism and frankly, social understanding.
I say the last bit before some geek complains that I'm focusing more on "image" instead the applicants credentials and hence ability to do the job. Unfortunately image is an important part of being human, and I didn't make the rules of human nature.
I no longer even want to think about changing my email address. I've been on Gmail now ever since I was able to beg an invite, and it would suck to try to update that many contacts.
This post did get me remembering when I used an @bigfoot.com redirector for a long time until they made some changes to the service that I didn't like.
"You can't win. You can't break even. You can't quit." -A. Ginsberg
I suppose I might lean towards giving my business to a non-AOL.com addressed resource if there was a choice....
Either way, it's better than something like "whoppo@BigButtSheep.com" - oh... wait.... that's my address. ::sigh::
chown -R us
Just two days ago my company received an inquiry from what might have been a potential new client -- but they used a gmail e-mail address.
At my company, we assume that legit businesses have company e-mail addresses like joe@mycompany.com -- anything else say potential spam or worse...
My Auntie Mable on the other hand uses one of the "public" e-mail providers, and that's just fine.
Just my 2 cents worth...
For a personal email i guess it's not so bad, at least for people working outside of IT..
I would expect anyone who applies for an IT related job to have their own domain at least.
What does put me off however, is businesses which use free email addresses... It's not uncommon to see a storefront or vehicle painted with the company name, phone number and logo on the side, and then a hotmail email address..
It's even worse when the business has it's own domain name for a website, but does not use that domain to host their email...
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
@aol, @hotmail, @"your-ISP-issued-free-address" are all signs that you don't take the internet seriously.
But there is an actual practical reason to avoid @aol emails. The mask is banned in lots of places and/or added to spam filters to send the mail straight into the junk folder.
Gmail and Yahoo Mail are free. There is no longer an excuse to use outdated mail hosts like AOL because above anything else, it's the Scarlet Letter of the web.
Ok, one last metaphor -- having an AOL email is like wearing a fanny pack around your neck whilst surfing the interwebs.
I would not hire someone with an AOL e-mail address unless it was a job stuffing pillows or working on a production line doing a simple, repetitive job. AOL (in my opinion) was always marketed as "our internet access is so easy, even a caveman can do it". Commercials showed people in their 30's saying "look, now even my elderly parents who can barely figure out how to use a computer can use AOL".
So what's the new cool?
j.public@ibm.com?
imsomebody@somebody.com?
bigkarma@slashdot.org?
a.megahottie@mayspace.com?
me@gmail.com?
What?
"I believe in Karma. That means I can do bad things to people all day long and I assume they deserve it." : Dogbert
You mean putting my @clownpenis.fart email address on my resume is a bad idea?
I'm not in HR (I am in IT though) so we may not even get that far. HR, then our supervisor has to vet the candidate before he or she even gets to us. Now we might rib the candidate prior to meeting them and then over it in the post interview chat depending on how it goes.
I'm more interested in work history prior to the interview and then their replies during the interview. We've had some interesting answers to questions :)
[John]
Shit better not happen!
Why would you use an e-mail address you don't own? A .com with e-mail/web hosting is peanuts these days. @aol.com or @gmail.com look bad because (1) you are too lazy to get your own domain name and (2) you run the risk of losing it at any time.
I would never in my life hire someone for a technical position if they have a hotmail account in their resume. Hotmail is to me and i suspect many others the most lame address anyone can have. If someone is a geek and still has a hotmail account i instantly file those under "rampant Microsoft fanboy" because most techies with some skills choose a much better mail provider.
HTTP/1.1 400
If I were hiring for some non-tech position then no, it wouldn't really matter. However, if I were looking to hire on a developer or admin then someone with their own domain, @cpan.org or some other project-related domain email address, etc, would signify someone who isn't just interested in a "career change" and thinks that "IT" is "easy" or "stable" 'cause they remember the bubble days of people getting money hand-over-fist with any sort of qualification at all.
But, as other said, its really the username that's important. I've had all kinds of ridiculous, throw-away email addresses in my day that had "cool" names. However, when I got my Gmail account back in the day (2003 or 2004 I think?), I picked my first two initials and my last name, as I was about half way through college at that point and figured that I needed a "respectable" email address along side my school email, which was first initial and last name @ my school.
My personal account on my own domain is middle name@14thanddock.com, and then I have other 'dumping' accounts, such as the one that my @cpan.org address gets forwarded to, and one that I use when I sign up for things that I know are going to keep sending me crap email that I don't want pushed to BlackBerry.
I know that its fashionable, especially in geek communities, to say that what other people think of you shouldn't matter and your work should speak for itself. Unfortunately that's not how most people work and in reality what other people think of you is approaches being the ONLY thing that matters. Having some suggestive pledge nickname on a domain with a bad reputation isn't doing you any favors and you know it.
Just get your own domain name.
It's what ? $20, $40.
What's cooler that having your own domain.
me@firstlastname.com
or
first@lastname.com
or, if your name wouldn't work:
yourname@aolsucksalot.com
BTW "aolsucksalot.com" is still available :)
Hey, I've actually done a comic on this subject! I'm firmly in the "I'd rather you have a cool email address then a suck-up one" camp.
dinosaur comics
I would (might?) not judge someone by their choice of email service provider. Being only human though, I would most certainly regard unfavourably applicants with email addresses like cool_dude19@hotmail.com or sistahs4eva@gmail.com. Pretty much anything which isn't some part of their name is a no-no, although the occasional exception for a well-thought out/curiosity-arousing local-part can be made..
[Slashdot Comments We Liked]
Nobody judges me by my email address
When I'm looking at a resume, I don't want to see RoxxyFoxxy@somewhere.com. Or something completely weird and difficult to decipher and type out. It's not hard to maintain a FMLastname or Firstname.Lastname@gmail.com and direct it to an address that expresses your individuality or whatnot.
Basically, I'm looking for professionalism. That means a resume with no typos or obvious errors/exaggerations ("Proficient in C, C+, and C++" is a gem that springs to mind), and appropriate attire at the interview. Having some kind of in-joke or bizarre reference or obscure handle as your username on the resume is kind of like wearing a tshirt with a weird slogan on it to the interview, although certainly not so severe.
@aol.com instantly kicks my spam filter rules. Use aol,hotmail or any russian address and I'm not going to see the mail. If you're not smart enough to avoid obvious filters you aren't smart enough to get the job ;)
I think it's similar to being dressed poorly for an interview. You may completely know your field, but if you show up looking foolish or inappropriate, then people will judge you. You may think that's unfair or not right, but people will do it and this is something very similar. As everyone else is pointing out, how long does it take to sign up for your own domain or use something at least current. AOL for an IT position? You don't have broadband? You don't have access to GMail? You can't sign up for your own site? Perhaps for a non IT field it's not as big a deal. It's the same as showing up with black jeans instead of slacks/khakis on. You couldn't spend $10 and some time to run out and buy something nice for the interview?
I will shred my adversaries. Pull their eyes out just enough to turn them towards their mewing, mutilated faces. Illyria
If the address is loads@beer.com or foxy4U2@hotmail.com, yes that probably won't help them get the job. Ditto if it is religous, political or whatever, The best option is to not try to be cute with the email address you are using professionally.
-- -- Warning. Do not stare directly at the sun.
In the one free software company I worked for, we had a board member that I had never heard of before that sent a company-wide e-mail from a hotmail address. A lot of us weren't very impressed with that. IMHO it's best to send work related things from your company's domain name, if it's purely personal I don't think it should matter.
I'll give you my email address. It's hansolo64@compuserve.com. Yes, CompuServe.
AOL is such ancient history that an AOL address is no longer bad. In all seriousness, it says that the person values keeping in contact with people from the past, establishing relationships for the long-term, and thus that this is a trustworthy and established person.
About three years ago while I was working for a small local consulting company; we have a client that we host emails for and they have an employee that absolutely love AOL and he refuses to use his company email account he prefer his personal AOL account. To me this doesn’t really show a whole lot of professionalism considering most every business now have their own email system in one form or another.
Even now working for a different company I still see individual using AOL or Hotmail even though they work for very well know and established companies.
Actually Yahoo these days is so fundamentally broken. Just try to do anything worthwhile with "Groups", or even try to unsubscribe from "Groups" from an account which forwards email to a non-yahoo account.
Being IT professional I frown upon having to search for half an hour for a stupid unsubscribe on their convoluted webapp, that should just work from the email I got anyways, after having to remember my yahoo-login and try to bypass their stupid forgotten password functionality which is different than anyone elses.
Rest of Yahoo is similarly in smolders, seems the UI designers over there have all fleed away screaming in terror and panic long long time ago..
Yahoo Finance though, is quite nice and current. Must be some department with some better management and some clue.
Conclusion, hell no. I would hire you on the spot! If you can handle so much crap, you must be perfect for an "IT job". ;-)
Yes, absolutely. If I look at a business online and it has an AOL or Hotmail email address (instead of an email address using their company domain), I would question its legitimacy. Put it this way, I won't buy anything from CheapViagraForYou@hotmail.com.
"weave"
there isn't a joke that hasn't been made about girls with weaves
"RogueyWon"
you're roguey? is that like sarah palin being mavericky?
"thepainguy"
hello mr. S&M. go spank behinds somewhere else
"Southpaw018"
ah yes, the proud left handed type, always announcing his left handed status without prompting. almost as annoying as the proud "i don't watch tv" type so damn proud of what nobody cares about
"91degrees"
makes me think of that lame pop band 98 degrees
"Pharmboy"
do you spam c1alis emails? or do sell adderall on your local college campus?
"MistrBlank"
i'm sorry for your reproductive issues. in vitro fertilization offers wonderful outcomes nowadays
point being: prejudice is ignorant, all-pervasive, and easy. the idea is not that you should conform your email/ nickname to such small minds, but that if you lose a contact, or a job, due to such small minds, you should consider yourself LUCKY for the loss of contact with such mediocre people
i know well-respected medical doctors with aol addresses from the 1990s. because they don't have time to play mindless little image games like this one. this whole issue is stupid
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
The real question that’s been asked is whether @aol.com can ever be considered a sensible email address to have today. It shows an antiquated view of the internet, yes, but it also shows that the person did not sign up for Gmail as their first email address simply because they have to have an address on their resume. I have seen that many times. Personally, I prefer my employees to have AOL addresses, check them regularly, and know how to use them rather than having their own domain name that their progeny configured and that they have no idea how to properly use. If you are filtering based on domain name, you should really ask yourself what you are doing in the position of hiring manager. If I find someone with the right qualifications, I might ask them about something that stands out as an oddity such as an @aol.com email address, but I would only do so for someone who should definitely have superior email knowledge to compete in their profession. On a related note, I personally give out an alternate email address on each resume I pass out – I never use my personal email address for anything business related.
One of my neighbors runs a nice sized utility and business as well as a landscaping supply/firewood company. Their contact email is AOL or Hotmail and no web presence. In my mind they probably should have their own domain for a business summary and going rates on the landscaping supplies and firewood, as well as something non-public for their email. On the other hand this business model works absolutely fine with the current demographics of developers in the area.
Another neighbor has a tree service business, but also does paving referrals and estimates for the first neighbor. He does bother with his own domain to explain services and prices and for his email contact. And he also seems to clean up on business from the local geeks because the local competition of a similar size works almost completely by yellow pages and word of mouth, which doesn't work with the new demographics of homeowners and businesses in the area.
so that's why i can't find a job :[
... how such idiocy is moderated insightful as I write....
I am sure I am a the top of my game in what I do.
The only 2 email addresses I ever had are are considered by some as "unprofessional" (as in oh my good, he is not paying for a service that he can get for free! The horror!).
So, does that obtuse view of some about the world should count more than a measured approach to the capabilities of somebody?
I say no, but again, I am at the top of my game, worked in many places in different countries, and occasionally interviewed and managed a few people in some companies of certain fame, so perhaps my opinion is atypical.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
not the domain/host name but the user name they have chosen.
mofo@
IamDeBezzt@
fu2lngtime@
I have countless others on file but not on top of my head. And yes I reject these faster than 1 CC.
Yeah I had to hire someone for the first time a few months ago. The first filter I applied to the hundred of CVs we got was email addresses, locations etc. It is very easy as it is usual at the top of the CV so it is easy to throw out people with unprofessional emails or people who live to far away. Assuming the job application is for a technical role then I dont buy the concept of unfair. Since it is an IT job then one of the criterias I have is that my technicans should at least be clever enough to realise how bad AOLs service is and not use them. Do I want a technican who builds personalised networks for our customers if he chooses himself by choice to use AOL? Probably not.
I would not want to work for a company, that can't stand that little bit of my creative punk attitude.
Therefore there is geoCities address in my CV next to the solid list of known technologies - in fact, it proved to be
more persistent, than one of current ISP.
Servant of karma
I'll often have a look at their domain if its a non-standard one. If they have a personal website (even if its not advertised on their resume), it can give you some guidance.
Are there professional people out there (recruiters, HR, etc) dealing with important decisions based on such juvenile approach to hiring?
No wonder some companies are struggling to find high calibre people, basing their hiring choices on criteria that would not be uncommon amongst unruly teenagers.
Really ....
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
"President@whitehouse.gov"
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
Sorry buddy, don't use plural.
I will judge people based on their merits and not on puerile assumptions.
I call that "us" professional people..
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
It's the user part I'd pay more attention to than the domain...
I tend to use two; one uses my usual online handle@googlemail.com the other is firstname.surname@.com - If I'm doing something professional I'll use my 'proper' address not for the domain part but as it just looks better having an email from a real name rather than a nickname.
--- Users are like bacteria -> Each one causing a thousand tiny crises until the host finally gives up and dies.
If I was sifting through several great applications and saw an AOL email address I would question the person's ability to adapt.
I was asked in a job interview recently that why, despite owning the domain name of my actual name, I was using a Windows Live email address. My answer was;
I have a reasonably long surname, so I don't use that domain name for email. Instead, I use my @live.com address because it's a lot shorter and rolls of the tongue better.
I was offered the job (I'd assume on other merits). Clearly it doesn't make that much difference. I suppose if my address was x_2_hawt_4_u_2007_x@hotmail.com there might have been a problem.
If I see a developer candidate who has his own personal domain, I'll mod him up. If I see somebody with AOL, I'll be less convinced. It's a bit like going for an interview with a mobile phone carrier, and giving a land-line as your phone number. Or maybe going for an interview as an HGV driver and asking if somebody can pick you up from the station.
The thing that really irritates the hell out of me is seeing vans for tradesman who have their own domain, but an AOL email address. E.g.
www.andys-plumbing.co.uk
andysplumbing@aol.com
Grrrr!
Domain issues:
Anyone using AOL says - I don't know anything about the internet.
Anyone using gmail says - I don't know anything about privacy, AND I don't care.
Anyone using HotMail says - I like Microsoft (or I don't know anything different).
Anyone using "mac.com" says - I'm an Apple loser with 1 button.
Cute usernames: ... or a job. First name, Last name, or some kind of initials with numbers after works to add a professional appearance.
Anyone using a cute username (non-domain part), doesn't take life seriously
Did I offend enough people?
As CIO, I wouldn't even hire people with these email addresses to a helpdesk dungeon position.
As a reader, I wouldn't believe anything written by an author with these email addresses. I would apply my own "this person is internet-stupid" filter. I couldn't help it.
Anyone who is trying to be a public person, author, or expert needs their own domain for email. Period.
...providers are "cool" while others are contemptible.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
There is an argument for hotmail - You may have created one for MSN. It has the advantage - assuming you use MSN - of alerting you to new emails on any machine you might use. I don't think any other webmail based services offer this without installing additional software. (MSN is also additional software but common enough not to be a problem)
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Individual people still use email? In this era of social networking, etc, I no longer use email for "personal" activities.
Folks whom don't "do social networks" generally also don't do email.
Some companies email me bills and statements. I get email receipts.
I still read some mailing list daily digests by email.
Other than that, email is just for spam, and is treated as such.
Its out of date, and would be like listing my favorite usenet groups or my favorite CB channel (uh, meet me on 35 upper sideband, 10-4?) on my resume.
Every job I've gotten in the last decade or so has been thru people I already know... the resume is just for HR to file...
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
"Compu...?"
"Yes Compuserv."
Why should i care about what service provider they are using?
What is next people? Are you going to check also if they are using an iPhone or not? The kind of car they drive? The newspapers they read?
Unless the email address is obviously offensive, I see no reason whatsoever to even be thinking about it.
Those people saying that IT people should have their own domain, honestly, get a life. Have a domain and associated website if you want to, but it is outlandish to suggest it should be a de facto thing.
I personally invest enough hours at work doing technology stuff, I have no need or inclination to be running a website at home. It is called balance, something some people around here should be aiming more for.
Personal domain a must?! For bunnies sakes ....
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Yes, maybe not just the domain, but the individual who had "sxxygrrl69@hotmail.com" probably didn't get the job.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/article6906437.ece
I think this is the treaty on the subject
...but what exactly is wrong with AOL Mail today? I created an account with it and saw nothing really wrong. Admittedly, I chose AOL because it is a less important account, but the webmail interface is satisfactory, they do not add signatures at the end of the email and offer free IMAP support, something that even Yahoo doesn't do. If the subject was Hotmail I would understand, as they do not offer IMAP and their interface is simply awful. But AOL, from my experience, is a quite good alternative to Gmail.
So because I do not have an email with my own domain I am stupid? oh so you hire people that can not do their job but they LOOK GOOD. Get into management because you guys are not programmers and you guys will never be
I can't help it...
I usually keep treating people with "infamous email domains" like children - at least unless they manage to prove they don't need to be "in time". Usually it just makes sense to tell "them" stuff. Like: "At least don't pay for a premium email account that - on top of it - sends you advertisements!". Or: "Don't put your finger into that hole, it might come out as a sausage at the other end if someone presses the wrong button!" in some cases.
Even if those are prejudice - those sometimes have a reason and make sense at least in my own personal "imaginary statistics". As in: There's a good chance, a person who is used to finding important stuff out on their own either would have found out that those email addresses "are bad" or that they shed a bad light on its user - and gotten a new one. Same goes for "people who are used to listening to good, sound advice instead of shiny adverts" and to some extend "people with common sense that are at least aware of it when they do something they don't understand and at some point start asking for help instead of messing up".
And stuff.
You're one to talk!
If I could mod you +1 for good demonstration of situational irony, I would!
And what if you work for AOL? No escape then.
People will judge based on email address. I have a firstname.lastname@domain.com (hosted by Google Apps) which forwards to personaladdresswhichisntsoprofessional@gmail.com (it's nothing bad, just a bit kooky). Know which one I submit for anything that might be deemed semi-professional? Yep.
It's not even that hard, Even firstname.lastname@commonemailprovider.com or firstinitial.lastname@isp.com is okay. Just set up a forward. If your provider doesn't allow you to forward, make a new account with one that does and forward it to your personal address.
Well if you're applying for an IT job with an AOL address, no matter which side of the fence you are on, I can't help but think this is the equivalent of a car engineer applying at a German company and he drives a KIA.
... that a websearch "Nancy E. Anderson" does not turn up much useful information, even if supplemented with one or another keyword/hint.
CC
TaijiQuan (Huang, 5 loosenings)
I would hold it against someone... in my mind it makes sense: Your either paying for AOL while using a broadband service, which suggests your wasteful and not very good at managing money, or using dialup which suggest you lack internet knowledge and experience necessary today. And regardless of your email provider, if your using something other than your name... you fail.
So what's Dubya up to these days? I wouldn't hire him to clean toilets.
Having a good email is like having a good phone number. You can't beat it, no matter how good your work is, if you have a hard to remember phone no, then your sh*t out of luck, where as the guy that has 666 3636 will get more business then you only because of the phone number. As for emails, if you have your very own website (which looks just amazing) for what ever ...a foundation for .com name, and that looks way more professional then your typical aol, or hotmail. If you write a boo, then use the free press email website they give you for your book, activate it, then you will be name@bookpress.com...which is even more professional because it makes you look directly tied into the book press you write for.
stray dogs, a portfolio for your websites, a guard on how to work properly, you get emails with that
PS- Seriously, is this even worth our time on /. ?
It's all about image. Being lumped in with the "AOLers" in some people's minds is simply not a good thing. Like a guy I know who thinks he's going to get business using a free website even when I tell him, "Dude, that's rank."
On the other hand, I was vain enough to keep my GEnie account [like CompuServe, kids] well into the 90s for the simple reason that I was enough of an early adopter to have my initials as my user name.
Yes, it would and it has. If you're dealing with 50+ resumes, any little thing like that helps reduce the pile. Unfair, perhaps, but if someone's supposed to be on good behavior, presenting their best face, and don't know better than to use, 'jedimaster@', how serious are clients going to take them?
...and some of their excuses are hard to argue against and not as simple to fix as you might think.
For example, the number one excuse is 'Our existing client base uses that address to contact us'.
'Simple' you think, 'I'll set their sales@whatever-isp.com address to forward to the address at their new domain and when they reply to their clients from the new address the clients will slowly migrate to the new address'.
The problem is that many of the worse ISPs/older email services don't allow redirects (or only for a limited amount of time, requiring you to periodically log into your webmail account to look at adverts)
'Okay then' you think, 'I'll set their new address to redirect to their @whatever-isp.com address, at least that way they can put the new address on the next load of print work they get done.'
The problem now is that they will still be replying from their @whatever-isp.com address which looks just as un-professional and more confusing for the potential client. Changing the From header isn't an option either (even if whatever-isp.com allows it) as it will break SPF records (and you DON'T want to be adding whatever-isp.com's SMTP servers to your 'allowed sources' list).
The options you're left with are to try and juggle two accounts while old clients migrate to the new address (SMEs hate this) or stick with the old address (unfortunately what often ends up happening).
I wouldn't be bothered that much for a developer. But for a company, that would be a no no.
or
"President@whitehouse.com"
might get you in the door faster.
Everyone knows it's practically impossible to end an AOL contract. I tell my clients that they should know that when other people see they're on AOL images of the word "IDIOT" tattooed on your forehead isn't uncommon. On the other hand, quitting AOL is time consuming and shameful. I know someone who had to ultimately claim (falsely) that they had two weeks to live before they could close an AOL account. Practical advice for non-IT users: An email account that is not tied to your ISP.
Say hello to my little sig.
A client of mine, for whom I had built a website, was in the middle of conversation with a potential buyer of his specialist services (diamond drilling). The job would be worth several thousand pounds GBP. The conversation was going really well, the buyer was convinced, and asked for his email address to exchange contract documents. My client, forgetting that he now had a new email address that reflected the specialist service, gave his old generalist email address (builder). The buyer immediately chose to disbelieve that he was a certified specialist, and withdrew the offer of work.
"Cock Up Your Beaver" does not mean what you think. This sig is intended to clog filters and annoy do-gooders
president@whitehouse.com
I do some hiring and I notice strange email addresses but I don't really even give them a thought unless they're obscene. I tend to look at it the same as a phone number. To keep life easy you want to keep it the same unless you have a crazy ex-girlfriend that won't leave you alone.
Let me fix that for you:
"President@whitehouse.com"
I forward everything coming from @hotmail.com and @aol.com to /dev/null
It would make a difference for me as I have certain domains (.cn, aol.com, hotmail.com) blacklisted in my spam filters so it all gets discarded. I'd simply never see any email from here.
Bad analogies are like waxing a monkey with a rainbow.
I use AOL for all my e-commerence and potential OMG I might get spammed communication. Nothing really WRONG with them. It's leave my gmail basically spamless. I tossed yahoo and hotmail long ago due to crappy archaic policies that limit your access to web only unless you pay them. *Yes Microsoft has pop3 access OHHHHH WOW POP3 in a world of imap... it would be like me bragging I just got a dial-up in a neighborhood full of DOCIS 3.0*
;P
Though I understand the reasoning. It's like "Dress like your ready to come to work and be promoted" and I do respect that. Though to delete it without even checking the resume inside? It would be like not even talking to the guy who showed up dressed nice but not suit and tying it. Let's be honest AOL has some stigmata but it's not like showing up to an interview in Flip Flops and a No Fat Chicks t-shirt
Maybe if your a person, looking to see if the place your applying for is a bunch of jerks, then go ahead and use that AOL address. They delete your email without reading it maybe you didn't want to work there. The filtering can work both ways.
Then again if your REALLY worried about this while job seeking. My advice is get an account on a domain you think would get you looked at. This doesn't cost THAT much *if anything at all* and then you can know you didn't get a call back because 7 years as Fry Chef at Burger Ranch doesn't qualify you to run a MySQL Database.
P.S. I know I could do stuff like, run a server on my own pop addy. I could use my ISP email. I know I could do a million other things but let's face it these big companies are not likely going anywhere and its an easy thing to do.
Build a list of potential employers, write nice CV/etc. to them; but one half of them (selected randomly) will get a "silly" e-mail address, while the other - "professional" one.
Especially if enough of us will do this, we might get a pretty clear picture even from responses (it's not like you really must be looking for a job...or sending out real CVs with real data)
One that hath name thou can not otter
Perhaps too smart to get the job they didn't want, working for morons who will eventually drive the company to auction because they equivocate fitness for duty with "an email address". There are two sides to this coin and the savant mentate who wore a purple tie to the interview would've been the one to send your stock soaring. But nooooooo, the same guy who turned down the B.J. giving slut in high school for the ballbuster trophy girlfriend is gonna be packin' his desk up this time next year at a failed company due to his lack of quality leadership and decision making. Typical of the anonymous coward.
*Repent!Quit Your Job!Slack Off!The World Ends Tomorrow and You May Die!
It is always a good idea to have multiple e-mails addresses. My main personal one is g-mail. I also have one on my own domain for business. I do have a couple yahoo ones for porn since I don't care how much spam gets flooded into those
The world is how you make it
I'd prefer resident@whitehouse.com
.
.
.
(The original site is gone. But old-timers will remember what it was.)
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
The idea, which the "so what" crowd seems to miss, is that the candidate not only have an "equal" address, but should stand out somehow. As parent notes, it doesn't take much to get your own domain, but doing so shows you DO pay attention to polishing details and DO know enough to make those details happen - to wit, going above and beyond.
The question should not be "should AOL etc. addresses be discriminated against", it should be "does the candidate excel beyond his 'equals'?"
(Yes I do have my own domain; my personal email is my name (al la first@last.TLD). I'm amused by how hard it is for people to comprehend this, and how amazed they are when they realize it.)
Can we get a "-1 Wrong" moderation option?
If the job has anything to do with IT then i would throw any apps with a @aol.com address into the trash. Any other Non-IT Type job, as long as the address professional before the @ part, it should make no difference.
Does it strike anyone as odd that a person with a publicist would not care about her image?
... like when you have a gmail account your email adress says: "Google will read the mail you're sending to this recipient".
I don't really give a hoot about @aol.com (but it still sounds a little funny). But e-mail, just like any outward facing part of yourself, makes up part of your image. I'm going to be less likely to have a positive first image from someone if I get a resume in my inbox from trew_gangsta_47@domain.com or latino_heat_69. C'mon, let's me reasonable here folks. It still surprises me the amount of resume emails I see from these kinds of addresses (I'm not joking).
For nothing other than resumes, you would think people would get a bit more normal gmail or hotmail address.
Ever been to the post office in Princeton, NJ, or the Southeastern Pennsylvania mail facility, which has an address of Valley Forge (even though it's in King of Prussia)? They have a ridiculous number of PO boxes - people want those addresses, they just sound so much better than Cranbury or Freehold or Conshohoken.
With email addresses, there is a difference - a vanity PO box tells me that the person may be willing to waste time and money to use that address, with an email address it's different, and depends on the address. With AOL, it tells me that you (someone) decided a long time ago that you needed some sort of net presence, had a CD that AOL had sent you and put in the computer, and since it worked, never looked back. It tells me that at least you don't put much effort into your net presence, and probably don't use it very effectively. That wouldn't be a problem for me if you were running a car repair shop, it would if you were selling me anything that had some direct relationship to communications.
Other addresses provoke different, mostly negative, reactions. pigsticker72@earthlink.net doesn't make me any more comfortable than RushDittoHead@hotmail.com - both make me want to run the other way.
It's become so easy to have your web address and mailbox have the same domain, one has to wonder about people who don't bother - is the rest of the office a mess? And domains are cheap, and easy to register. Not having time or claiming not enough savvy makes you look lazy and dumb.
Sorry. That's what I see
Will Slashdotters ever stop posting headlines in the form of a stupid, meaningless headlines?
Utilizing the synergization of benchmark e-solutions to pre-workaround action items!
hmm, my email address seems to be loved by all the law firms I apply to..... head.of.legal@sco.com
Yes, people will make snap judgements. Whether that is moral or not is subjective.
People make snap judgements on ethnicity, sex (admit it - how many times have you turned down a girl for an IT position?), name (which might denote ethnicity or class), accent, disability, sexual orientation, looks, smell... all kinds of things which probably bear no relation to how well they might do a job. But... these things CAN be an indication - chances are a guy who turns up smelly to the interview won't get a public relations job, or a slim girl won't get a construction job.
This is why when sorting through applicants, we keep personal details separate from experience details. A lot of UK based universities and employers do this. Applicant A might seem perfect for the job, and I won't be influenced by the fact that Applicant A is an ugly fat black lesbian wheelchair-bound African immigrant. With an AOL address. Even if I had a prejudice against any of those facts.
Know some one really smart person that you respect that used an AOL email address? Just that one experience negates my dislike for AOL, hence, I lose my propensity to jump to a simplistic conclusion. Moreover, some of the same people have found it effective for their needs. Finally, who am I to judge.
A supposedly lame email address may not seem as dumb at some time in the future, if perhaps the company that has a theme of doing no evil decides it was mistaken. Say we discover a <i>cloud</i> over our heads, it knows many of our damaging secrets and we are blackmailed into doing its bidding. Our formally generous hosts have other goals and are no longer the cool location for our correspondence. It need not be the company alluded to that follows this path, any cloud would do. However, in contrast just a Lame E-Mail Address would be much deferrable if only we had one to protect ourselves from our superficiality and self deluding knowledge.
It is so much easier to judge others on simple external signs and ignore the harder task of judging the value of the person.
You can reach me at han.solo@compuserve.net
Yes, I said CompuServe.
and I'm sure it's been posted already - your.name@yourdomain.* , where yourdomain has your CV and a bunch of other relevant stuff. Links to things you contribute to, job related interests, samples of your work or a work portfolio, and so forth.
46 & 2
i have an A in my first name that i substituted as @ and bought a domain name that used everything after the A. so on my resume my email address is @.com. it's gotten a lot of positive feedback as being clever and tech savvy and friends easily remember it. /ac because of stupid password reset
houstonmat
If it's the HR weenie who will read your application, it is better to be "fashionable" and stay with the "current trend".
If it's a company that you hope will be your best job, and you get rejected only because of @aol.com, then be happy, it is not your dream job. That company does not know how to hire good people based on facts, and they also dont know HR is screwing up hiring on the basis of email domains. That's a big red flag for a dream job.
Otherwise, in general, how can you forget Murphy's law: "If anything can go wrong, it will !"
I wouldn't hang my hat on Yahoo, Hotmail, or Gmail being a neutral domain. You might like their image today, but any one of them could easily do something boneheaded or evil in the next couple years and reflect negatively on you. Or they could decide to stop providing free email accounts (or any public accounts at all) and then you'll be cut off from everybody who knows you by that address.
Likewise for Comcast, Verizon, or other ISP addresses. As soon as you move or change providers, everybody loses contact with you. And those companies have even more volatile images, since they advertise for themselves and against competitors primarily on image itself.
You could use your address at your current employer if you have one. But then you're also tied to their image, will lose your address if you leave the job, might reveal too much or reflect badly on your employer if you publish that address, and open yourself up to monitoring by your employer.
There's also the route of rolling your own. But then you're stuck administering your own domain, paying the registration and hosting fees, and relying on your own taste and domain availability to choose a neutral-sounding name.
And finally there are organizations that will allow you to subscribe to an account. There are private email providers which leave you with the risk that the provider could go out of business and leave your address dead. And there are public institutions like universities which are constructed to exist in perpetuity and generally maintain a favorable image, but leave you associated with education and might connote inexperience.
Personally, I have all of these kinds of email accounts. Most of them I use for only very specialized purposes. But the one I use for my independent professional interactions is the EDU account. I can rely on that one to continue existing as long as email accounts are popular and it follows me around from job to job and city to city. The academic association isn't too bad since my field values education, but I can imagine that some potential associates might get the idea that I'm fresh out of school. And some people might have feelings of rivalry toward my university or animosity toward higher education in general.
So I think it's really hard to find a neutral email address. All of them leave you vulnerable to negative images, discontinuation of service, or extra expense and hassle. You can hitch your wagon to whichever seems neutral today, but somebody somewhere someday will judge against you based on it.
I have to admit that when I see an AOL email address or something similar I notice it, thinking, "how frumpy".
Then again I've been a programmer for 11 years.
My guess is that fields that have little to do with IT might not care as much.
I wouldn't let an AOL address bother me, but I once had a job candidate present his resume to me with his email address pimpboy@h*tm*il.com displayed prominently at the top. Needless to say...
Gee, remember when short domains were cool? And ones that spell themselves? Not no more.
Is @aol.com worse than @compuserve.com? Is it the age of the service we're supposed to be discriminating against, or just the fact they're the ISP that launched a thousand-thousand newbies? I'd hate to hate for the wrong reasons.....
Years ago many of my classmates decided to switch e-mails at the end of school for resume purposes. Usually from hotmail to yahoo, and some are using gmail more nowadays. The concern with hotmail was less about brand recognition and more about spam recognition. Worries that hotmail addresses were more likely to be filtered by the employer, and more likely for a job offer to end up in the Junk folder. Yahoo isn't exactly more professional, they just figured it was more reliable, and I expect employers did too.
That's because you spelt 'bigots' wrong.
Interestingly, I've had non-technical people do odd things if I use my own subdomain e-mail address rather than something like GMail or my school account. Most often I notice that someone will completely ignore me. Once I even had a "I don't know who you are, but don't impersonate my students" response from a teacher. My guess is that such people assume nobody they know is technically oriented enough to figure out how to setup their e-mail a bit differently.
Other than AOL the only "toxic" email provider I can think of might be Hotmail, and that doesn't really bother me. I'd be much more put off by someone whose address is fucktheman@gmail.com or similar.
If you are applying for a job, and you have any question as to whether or not something might keep you from getting hired, why would you risk it? It's so easy just to create a new email address. Don't risk losing the job over something so easy to fix.
I agree. What matters is whether he/she has a low /. UID.
"Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past." -- George Orwell
I'm still trying to figure out why I never get emailed updates on the status of my applications. What's wrong with MikeUnderscore2004@yahoo.com?
I'm up for a job. Email me at: hacker@thepiratebay.com
Without a personal recommendation from someone I know and trust? Yes.
Exception being niche areas. As an example, my boss showed me an advertisement for a parts supplier. The fact that it was an @aol address was to me reassuring. Mainly because the parts are for "programmable" electronics made in 1983. To put it in perspective, if an EEPROM becomes badly corrupted the engineers familiar enough with these systems to help are retired.
I assume it's EEPROM anyway. Anything else that can be reprogrammed via the standard system interface and is non-volatile from that time period?
I don't understand why AOL is ripped on so much in the community. AOL mail supports unlimited IMAP/POP3/SMTP storage. REAL IMAP. REAL.
For those of us who prefer non-web-based mail readers such as Thunderbird or mutt (for their speed, configurability, or better offline-support), full and complete IMAP is a MUST. Gmail supports the IMAP protocol, but the mapping between tags and folders is so disparate that I find it completely useless.
I won't show up to an interview with a cravat, but I do wear a top hat and bridge coat when I walk to work in the winter. It's quite a bit of fun. I work at a CPA firm.
SIG: HUP
I prefer the following:
UUCP: {world}!ucbvax!ucscc!ucscb!aaronrp
Write Only Memory: Another pointless blog.
It matters.
One reason is that some companies have acquired bad reputations in the tech sector for various reasons. One reason might be privacy issues, another might be technical (recall the old closed nature of the AOL system), yet others could be social in nature (all technophobes seem to be their target group, therefore it gives an image of their users being technologically incompetent).
AOL users have an image of technological incompetence, that's the image you project when handing that address out.
Companies spend a lot of money on changing their image, yet it rarely works. A strong image is important, and must be cultivated from the start. So if the person in the story wants to change her image of technological incompetence she must be ready to spend some time on that
Similarly, Mac users have a reputation of smugness and being graphic designers. I use a mac, am rather smug, but I'm a USABILITY designer, world of difference ;)
Ok, sometimes the stereotypes actually fit..
Just look at my Slashdot user name.
I used to work at an executive placement firm, and regularly had to plow through the folder of emails tagged 'Suspicious' in order to forward resumes to the recruiters that ended up there. Eh, Oh Hell and Hotmail addresses that had .doc attachments almost always ended up there because of the gazillion bots forwarding Word viruses from those domains then.
Because these were management types they also had the idea that their shit smelled like roses. They didn't seem to understand that an email address like hairybeast@ or dommistress@ were not appropriate for their resume. When asked for an alternative email the first guy gave us harrybeastieboy@ instead.
"Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin
That email has been up for outright rejection for almost a decade.
"easier to have a webmail address as primary instead of an ISP's in case I move somewhere else"
Buy your own domain name. It is $10 USD (or less) a year. Then, Nimey@Nimey.com can point to your current ISP.
Dave Barnes 9 breweries within walking distance of my house
...just like everything else you do in an application process. Duh.
Everything about you should confer a sense of professionalism and competence. How you dress rarely has any direct impact on your performance, but if you dress lame for the interview then it shows you either don't know how or don't care. Same if your application uses language that is informative but too casual for a formal written application and so on.
Those kind of points can really only work one way, against you. They're not buying the suit, they're buying the man in the suit and it'll never land you the job. It's just seeing whether you'll rub people the wrong way, be it customers, coworkers, managers or whoever else you have to relate to. You are going to work with many people you wouldn't hang out with, after all.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Even if you happen to hang on to your AOL e-mail address because you don't want to change it, there's no need to put it on your resume.
The professional societies to which I belong -- IEEE and ACM -- as well as my alma mater, offer e-mail forwarding addresses. So I can set up a respectable-looking e-mail address, such as sirgarlon@alumni.almamater.edu, and have that redirect to the address I actually use. Who cares if that address is doofus123@aol.com? My business associates ain't gonna know.
I would be quite surprised if societies for other professions, such as law or medicine or even journalism, don't have similar services.
[Sir Garlon] is the marvellest knight that is now living, for he destroyeth many good knights, for he goeth invisible.
Real employers with real brains focus more on the prefix rather than the domain.
For example i'm far more likely to hire someone from the first email address below, rather than the second.
sensiblename@aol.com
ilovechoad@ihavemyowndomainwhoopee.com
president@whitehouse.com is waiting to hear from you right now.
Leaving aol.com aside, think about what your e-mail address says about you. During the '90s we had a real problem with students who had chosen "cool" names for their user accounts trying to change them when applying for jobs. nicotine@???.edu and worse, much worse. Even my own e-mail caused some headaches as it was a foreign word that could be mis-interpreted in english. jsmith@????.com is better than joeblow@????.com or mystique@porncentral.com (I just made that up, and have absolutely no idea if that is a valid e-mail or not.)
It's worth noting that for very little you can register a domain and forward all or some e-mail addresses from it to your regular account.
1: type www.gmail.com in the browser of your choice's address bar
2: click create an account, in the lower right
3: follow the rest of the instructions.
Get over yourself already.
Having an AOL email address is no more an indication that the owner is for or against innovation than the colour of their skin, their gender or the cut of their jeans. You're confusing the whimsical ebb and flow of fashion with technological advance. For what it is worth, you also took his reference to not messing with things which work right out of context.
You might just as well have started your email, "Times change, people's prejudices change..."
You need to take a long hard look at yourself before you start justifying the nonsense you spout.
I really can't be bothered to set up my own stuff.[1]
Plus I tend to procrastinate, and I'd probably end up with a squatter getting the domain several months after I print up a bunch of business cards.
[1] I do run Linux at home and work, got a long-lived Debian file/inventory/web server at work, but I'm really OK with letting a professional company with real sysadmins run my mail service. Beats dealing with spammers myself.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
And more importantly, if you have a domain name you're not tied into the webmail provider OR your ISP.
I have firstname@lastname.com as my email address (yes, it's a bit generic - ha!). All my email accounts on my domain are consolidated within a gmail account, but now they allow me to properly use my own SMTP server via GMail, I can completely invisibly do this. So nobody sending mail to or receiving mail from me knows it's all done by Gmail.
Not only am I completely decoupled from my ISP, I'm also decoupled from my mail provider. If Google does something I don't like, or something better comes along (unlikely, but possible) I can switch my email instantly at no cost. Likewise, if I'm unlucky enough to have my mail suspended for some reason, again, I'm not at GMail's mercy.
Complete lack of reliance on mail provider and ISP is the only way to be sure.
Yes. In business, image is everything. The appearance of "johnd@companywebsite.com" is far more professional than that of @hotmail, @gmail or even @isp (perhaps especially @isp, as it shows you're too cheap or lazy to setup a better email address for yourself).
OK, what if you don't have a website? We're a decade into the new millennium. Even if you don't expect to make online sales or attract new customers online, you should still have a website, if only for the online presence.
If you have an MSN email address for example (e.g. @msn.com.@hotmail.com), some email might fail, or not get sent to you, because of something to do with MX servers and the fact that Hotmail throws away suspicious stuff, really paranoid-y, instead of throwing it in your spam box. Also a lot of companies think "This person isn't paying for email. Let's block Hotmail emails" - which I have seen a couple of times.
/. .
Why not have a catch-all email on your domain? It's rather handy as you can sign up to things like myname_thecompany@mydomain.com - and then if the company sells it off, you'll know who did it and you can get people fired. I have heard of a guy that got 3 people fired for that. Perhaps it was on
I think that it does make a difference more & more, especially aol, yahoo, hotmail and some of the other free ones. I work in the world of publishing, specifically classified advertising, and we have a huge amount of fraud attempted with these types of email addresses. Even gmail is beginning to be suspect. I understand that everyone wants an email address that is portable. A service like MobileMe costs less than $10 a month and it's portable and offers other advantages as well.
I have reseller accounts at some of the larger hosting companies, and manage a lot of domains on the internet, i still use gmail accounts. i actually have several different accounts, most of them forwarding, and with rules setup to star emails sent to other accounts, etc, but i've never cared enough to get my own domain just for me, as a place to store my resume... I will say that when i've applied for jobs, I tend to take the application less seriously when its going to an aol account..
An I.T. motto in the hands of an idiot is a dangerous thing...
When I use my sam@lastmeasure.zoy.org e-mail address, people who know this successful domain with thousands of visitors immediately take me as seriously as required on the Internet.
God, root, what is difference ?
... especially for an IT job.
If you are selling yourself as some kind of system administrator or alpha geek, you damn well better not have an E-mail address that ends in @aol.com, that's for darn sure.
Oddly enough, gmail.com doesn't have the same stigma.. but I'm still going to be more impressed by somebody who has a "me@me.com" address (or as others have pointed out, a "me@acm.org" address associated with a well-respected professional organization).
.
If you make hiring decisions based upon unrelated-to-the-job things like email addresses, then you deserve the level of employees that you get. What's next, not hiring someone because the name of the street they live on is dorky?
as evidenced by many applications for faculty positions at a Pharmacy School that will remain unnamed. More than have of the applicants (most having multiple doctorates,) had e-mail addresses that could be described as "unprofessional" to say the least. The sad part is that all applications still had to be processed, as it is a state institution.
If you live amongst fools, who are riddled with prejudices, then smart as you are, you are at their mercy and will have to adapt.
These things are self fulfilling; if the crowd believes people with big eyes are witches, then it might make sense for people with big eyes to squint a little - daft as the belief of the crowd might be.
It's sad that we have to alter our lifestyle to accommodate the whim and chance thought of the massed ranks of fools.
1 year ago, it wasn't.
Someday they'll be considered retro
Instead, I use my @live.com address because it's a lot shorter and rolls of the tongue better.
That's the most important point to anything I've read so far on this story. Use an address that will be read easily. Avoid words that lead to confusion when spoken over the phone.
This is extremely important to foreign language speakers.
I don't dismiss applicants based on domain very often, moreso for their actual account name. I've had senior level applicants apply for IT jobs with names like the following.
@budlight.com
deadhead420@
flrtygal69@
faq2loser@
noobpwner@
Not professional. AOL.com doesn't bother me by itself
I'd say it definitely matters. Though unlike some here, I wouldn't specifically toss your resume out because it comes from aol.com (msn & hotmail though, I'd probably assume it's a spam mail and toss it.) Free e-mail addresses are fine if you're out of work looking for a job. Gmail is possibly always okay right now, though that's likely to change over the years if people start getting too much crap from such addresses. And as many have said it's quite cheap to get your own domain to send e-mail, using any provider you actually want for the e-mail hosting.
Now, far more importantly though, if I'm a customer looking for someone to provide a professional service for me, then damn have your own domain. Nothing will turn me away from a business faster than if they don't have a real e-mail address to reach them at. Real estate agent? Should have e-mail through your umbrella corp. Lawyer? Why isn't your e-mail from your law firms address. Even little self employed groups, selling hand made soaps at the farmers market? Get homemadesoaps.com or something and use it! But a aol.com or hotmail.com address just screams scam when you're trying to buy something or get a service performed.
I could use my stanford.edu or mit.edu alumni forwarding addresses in a job search. But I have been pretty lucky and haven't needed to cold-call a job app in a couple of decades.
Would you hire someone for your IT deptartment if their email address were from an AOL account?
I am Bennett Haselton! I am Bennett Haselton!
aol is not a polished provider. they have overeager spam filters marking legitimate emails mistakenly spam too often. they also block entire ip ranges to prevent 'spam'.
what this means is, someone using an aol email address will be regularly missing a lot of legitimate normal and business emails because aol either blocks their ip range en masse because it saw some spammers using zombies in that address block, (or some black sheep spamming from shared hosting) or their overeager spam filter marked it as spam.
it means that you are living in the digital age, but dont know zit about which service good or which service not. its like using a crappy phone service for business despite you have premier services available.
Read radical news here
Granted, the second half of the email isn't as much of a deal breaker as the first half. While I might chuckle at DaveRoberts@AOL.com, I'd afford them more respect than... animeluvr6969@gmail.com, for instance.
This is why I maintain a relationship with a good headhunter. The idea of trying to deal with the "random filter of the week" person staffing the HR desk at any moment in any company is just depressing. Oh no, this one used dots instead of dashes for list bullets. Must be a drug user. Oops, this one didn't embolden the section headers. Obviously a lazy worker.
Hey, Yossarian is looking at the resumes today. Death to modifiers!
If he has it hosted on geocities then he should score well for a security position - he's already poisoned your DNS he probably knows the network inside out.
I'd like to point out this article by Dr. Mitja Back et al.:
Back, M. D., Schmukle, S. C. & Egloff, B. (2008). How extraverted is honey.bunny77@hotmail.de? Inferring personality traits from email addresses. Journal of Research in Personality, 42, 1116-1122.
PDF available on the author's website.
If you think a third-rate email service is perfectly acceptable, I don't want you running my email servers...
I mod down anyone who says "I will be modded down for this", regardless of the rest of their comment
On the topic of professionalism, I'd put a black tick against having a personal domain name because:
1) it's a sign of vanity/ego and as an employer, I'd much prefer intelligence to ego;
2) it's contributing to domain name space pollution (I'd lump it in with cyber squatting in terms of benefit vs harm);
3) I have no confidence that it actually works because I have no idea who hosts it - if anyone.
Speaking as someone who has seen the horror that is lollypopporn@hotmail.com and pornstargunnabe@hotmail.com, I can tell you that some email addresses really don't belong on any kind of job app.
On the flip side, I tend to treat people who have @gmail.com pretty seriously, because hey, props to you for getting in early enough to get your name as a gmail account.
That said, I am probably going to give a name like john.cocktoasten@gmail.com a second glance.
If only at the bill.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I would not make it the critical thing for a hirering, but if someone has a hotmail adress, I'd put that person rather low on my list of possible picks.
I do the evaluation of candidates when my company uses contractors for software development projects and non-windows deployments and migrations (since I'm old enough to have worked with all the common non-windows OS).
The e-mail addresses doesn't matter one bit, aol and hotmail on resume are fine, plenty of older experienced people have such things. A person who designs product configurators, expert systems or medical insurance adjudication software has a vastly different view of IT than most of you. A lot of them would think *you* are lame for considering a PC or garden variety x86 server a real computer.
An accountant doing the same would probably come off as highly professional.
Even more so if he later asked to have his card back. Those things don't grow on trees you know.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
The biggest problem lies in when you get an email address that just sounds bad. And I don't mean bad like @aol.com, I mean somethin' bad like my old boss, who tried to make an email address using his intials, the company he "owned", and all of this @verizon. It was just wretchworthy in my opinion. Truth be told though, I'll look just as hard at who the person registers the email address as, like gmail has you do. Anyways, my $0.02.
Gmail is $0 a year and can be accessed through Web or POP3. It also doesn't require me to waste my time or money maintaining a mail server.
I'm not sure I'd want to work for someone who's obsessive-compulsive enough to care about my e-mail address.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
I'm no longer NoPantsJim@-----.com. I was also lucky that Facebook let you change your username at least once, so facebook.com/NoPantsJim is history. It was a college nickname and lots of my old friends still call me that, but I graduated 3 years ago and it felt very silly sending out work emails and resumes from that address.
Once I switched to JamesR(mylastname)@gmail.com, I noticed the responses to my resume increased dramatically.
Name...That...Autocomplete!
You're a cheapskate who's willing to trade your privacy for free e-mail. How smart is that?
A person - particularly a non-IT person - who still uses AOL obviously does so for a reason. Such as, it's the address they've been using for 10+ years, everyone they know - both personally and professionally - knows them by that address, it's easy to remember, and it always works.
Personally, I see it the other way around, as an effective way of weeding out the managers you really don’t want to work for.
I’m a competent and experienced IT professional that have been using Hotmail for a long time, and I’m quite happy with it for the purpose it serves. Tried Gmail, didn’t see the reason to switch. I could say more about why I prefer Hotmail, but that’s not really the point here.
If I apply for a job and someone calling themselves a manager is so “clever” that s/he is actually judging people based on such inane criteria as the choice of email provider, not the CV or references, then I will be very, very, very happy that I don’t have to work for such a close-minded, judgmental manager that is not able to prioritize what’s important. Very happy, thank you!
than having AOL as your email could say either 'N00b' or it could say 'retro'.
a persons car? their home? the clothes they wear?
we all judge people everyday for a multitude of things they do/say/have. its human nature. it keeps rolex and lexus in business. take your girl to jared, then take her to tiffany. both sell crystallized carbon. but see the difference in her reaction.
there is only one thing worse than using an aol.com e-mail address, and that is connecting to aol via an old packard bell pc via dialup.
I don't understand why AOL is ripped on so much in the community. AOL mail supports unlimited IMAP/POP3/SMTP storage. REAL IMAP. REAL.
For those of us who prefer non-web-based mail readers such as Thunderbird or mutt (for their speed, configurability, or better offline-support), full and complete IMAP is a MUST. Gmail supports the IMAP protocol, but the mapping between tags and folders is so disparate that I find it completely useless.
Okay, so back in the Dark Past, there was a thing called Usenet. And the Evil Daemons of AOL looked upon the Usenet, and after much badgering from the few Enlightened users of AOL, the Daemons saw that it was good. And so they unleashed the feeble Horde upon the Usenet, and the Horde made merry mayhem with many a Quest for Tits and Boobs.
And then, one day a Mighty Troll looked upon the Horde, and conceived a Cunning Plan. He then cross posted to as many Usenet groups as he could be Arsed to cross-post to the simple phrase "I have the Sheryl Crow nude pics, email me if you want them". And shortly thereafter some Damn Fool subscribed to AOL posted to all of the Usenet groups "I would like the Sheryl Crow nude pics". And, moments later, another Damn Fool responded with "Me too". Suddenly, it seemed like a tidal wave of sheer stupidity overwhelmed all of Usenet as one Damn Fool after another responded to every single Usenet group the original troll was cross-posted to with the utterly banal response, "Me too".
Now, not only is this tale one of the most poignant of the Horror that was the September That Never Ended, but it also explains: a) why we who knew the internet before the 'tards were let loose loathe that moment in history b) why many people use the phrase "AOL" to mean "Me too" c) why so many of us in the community would like to take AOL and their stupid setup CDs and repeatedly drown and resuscitate them until it no longer works.
Nuff frigging said?
Some lame e-mail domains:
The ugly truth about many prejudices is that when you know nothing but one little piece of information, they're usually better than a coin flip. (Of course, intelligent people always try to get more/better data and judge individuals, not generalities.)
When I see an AOL, Compuserve, or even Yahoo e-mail address, I usually suspect the person is either old, technologically hopeless, or conservative --likely all three. The constellation makes intuitive sense to me; these are folks that value familiarity over innovation. This is not an empirical assumption, but based off the e-mail forwards and forum posts I see from people on these services.
Ask me about my sig!
If someone is applying for an IT job, an AOL address tells me something about their background and their degree of technical savvy. If it's not an IT job, it doesn't really matter. We can't all be geeks.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
When I hire someone, it's generally for graphic arts positions. A lame email address (and by that I mean "AOL" or virtually any "free" email address that comes with Internet access) is an early indicator that the person interviewing is not as technologically savvy as I'd like to find. It's not a hard and fast rule - just an indicator. I've found that a lot of credible candidates have free email accounts from Hotmail/Yahoo/Gmail, and that doesn't seem to have any bearing on their tech savvy. But let me see something from "clueless1975@roadrunner.net" or "luddite6@aol.com" and I can promise you, they won't know their ass from their elbow when it comes to online work. Ironically, my best friend used his AOL address as his primary/home email for years...until I finally convinced him of Gmail's superior anti-spam filtering. And he was a fairly technical guy...a former mid-level manager at HP, GTE, and Nortel. You just never know...
Captain Digital Fighting for truth, justice, and graphic design.
I prefer a generic email address if at all possible. yourname@{gmail | hotmail | yahoo}.com or something like that.
Anything crazy before the @ is bad news.
I don't mind too much what comes after the @, with one exception. If you have a domain that I am not familiar with (for example, yourname.com) I am going to go and check out whats there, and I *will* judge you on what I find.
Specifically if it includes anything non-professional. yourname@yourname.com is perfectly ok, as long as yourname.com isn't a website about torrents, nakedness, complaining about your previous boss, doing anything at all with questionable legality, etc. in which case it becomes as bad as seeing yourname@{istealsoftware | lookatmenaked | ihatemyboss | chronic4life }.com
I think the job position has to be taken into account. We were recently hiring for an IT role and had applicants with hotmail, AOL, gmail, yahoo, and personal domain email addresses. One of the main things we do is provide email to our clients. Anyone running their own mail server is clearly ahead of the game. Anyone still using AOL or Hotmail hasn't paid enough attention to email to be concerned with spam filtering or other quality services. We still interviewed these people, and my coworkers might not have held it against them, but anyone using a Hotmail address has serious marks against them for a mail administrator role, the way I see it.
But a job that isn't an IT role, you can't expect them to know better ;)
No sig for you. YOU GET NO SIG!
Businesses some times go to great pains to make sure everyone's external communications are all similar and consistent. Mandatory signatures, templates with logos and such, clearly they think image matters and at some level it does so it does for individuals too.. How much, it's hard to say, I can't say I've ever went from 'consider' to 'reject' because of his email provider.. I kind of think that kind of a decision would reflect more poorly on my and my company's decision making abilities than it actually did on the applicant.
So long as we're still using SMTP, I still feel it's my obligation to point out how f-ed up the protocol is, point at the spam and the point out the lack of legitimate forwarding that all plague it. I have an email acocunt that I've had for 15 years, it's through an ISP that probably has bad karma with some (no, not AOL or anything like that) and I pay something like $5 a month for their cheapest dialup service simply to keep the email address. I've started moving to a different place but every time I get ready to cut off (gasp) earthlink, I get some email from Fidelity about an account I didn't remember, or an email from an old friend or relative or something else that I'd like to continue to get and didn't remember or know to notify about the address change.
In addition to maybe using some encryption for privacy, perhaps using TLS and CAs to help verify sending servers and maybe give us some edge or means to curb spam, forwarding would be a tremendous asset to a new email protocol. Not simply forwarding to the new address, but a response to the sender's relay that had the new address and it could then correctly send the address and maybe automatically update an address book or send a note to the sender, or both.
"President@whitehouse.com"
Comcast ones are the most annoying. Stupid to tie yourself to an ISP.
It doesn't bother me so much for job applicants -- It's less important than proper attire, etc.
But for politicians it is a definite black mark. Especially when they have a professional domain name, but a hotmail/yahoo/aol -- yes, even gmail email address. It tells me that they nor anyone on their staff is "with it" technically and to me that means they won't use technology appropriately during their term.
For the past 12 years, I've been making & selling Klein Bottles. A quick analysis of online order email addresses (no, I don't spam!) shows the decline in AOL domain for people ordering onesided manifolds:
1997 13% (about)
1998 15% (about)
1999 16% (about)
2000 14.8%
2001 13.4%
2002 12.2%
2003 10.0%
2004 4.8%
2005 4.4%
2006 4.7%
2007 3.9%
2008 3.5%
2009 2.5%
Cheers, -Cliff
I really can't be bothered to set up my own stuff.[1]
Plus I tend to procrastinate, and I'd probably end up with a squatter getting the domain several months after I print up a bunch of business cards.
Wow, I'd hire you in a minute.
Registrars send emails when your domain is due for renewal. Many will renew it automatically for you, unless you tell them not to. Some will let you add extra credit to your account, so you don't need to worry if your bank/card details change.
Why Should it matter if you got a aol address vs a gmail or yahoo? I mean as long as it's not ima@dumbass.com you should be fine.
This needs more cowbell!!!
As AOL has always been a big rip-off, yes using an AOL email address is not a good idea. Email addresses like party247365@****.com shouls also be avoided for obvious reasons.
A compusurve email address would be hilarious but I don't think I'd ever use it professionally, though I would most certainly give it out to all my "tech" friends if nothing else than to get reactions from them every time they had to use it. AOL email on the other hand hasn't quite reached that status (mainly because they're still in business). A yahoo address is acceptable, but I always question why they don't have a gmail account.
No. I think today people understand that if you have been using an address for a long time you stick with it.
Only douche bags discriminate against people based on their email addresses. So, if you deal with a bunch of douche bags, you might want to change your email address. Or, you might want to just not care about the douche bags and what they have to say.
When my friends all started to migrate over to gmail mail people would encourage me to get a gmail address and account. My answer was; um, it doesnt offer me anything I want or need. I've had the same yahoo email address since 1998. I also have my own domain email... which I just forward to my yahoo account. I've known idiots who have had 50 email accounts spam everyone with their new account info... gay.
so, let me state this clearly; if you think that the host name of someones email address matters because its 'old' you are pretty much a dumb stupid douche bag whom i hope gets hit by a car.
The bigotry around AOL is so fucken stupid. I remember irc chans that would ban AOL addresses. Um, its the IRC, its already retarded, AOL isnt gonna make it worse. It's narrow minded asshatted bigotry. Anyone remember the hackers manifesto? we exist without skin color, nation of origin... Yet tech people freeluy discriminate against host names... Dont judge a person based on their content, what they have to offer, etc... but by their host names? I shake my head and thing... gezus... what bunch of dumb mother fuckers. May lead pipes meet the back of each of your skulls just so we have a little less bigotry and asshattery around.
I actually think that @aol.com addresses are sorta cool and retro. same with @excite or @hotmail. What it says to me is "man, that person has had that address for a long long time." It means they were around at about the time things were becoming main stream. In many cases it even says to me, gee, this person has been involved with computers or IT for a long long time.
I've never had AOL... but I've known some very high IQ people that have and who have been discriminated by clueless douche bags based soley on their host names.
I know that if i read other user comments on this subject that I will want to go smoke crack just so i can make myself retarded enuf to understand what the asshats are saying.
No one said anything about you running your own domain. If you don't want a website, but want email, you simply forward it to your current ISP. Set it on auto-renew, and you never have to worry about squatters.
You don't NEEED a website.
I just can't see sophisticated software engineers, DBAs, systems engineers, of anyone else in IT carrying an AOL email address with a straight face.
Ruby Neural Evolution of Augmenting Topologies
I am the person I am, and my clothes are just bits of cloth. Fashion is for people who are willing to judge people on the superficial!
I had a HUGE problem with that concept for years and years. consequently, I dressed like a highschool geek; conservative clothes I hoped looked professional enough to not get laughed at. I'd never want to wear anything remotely out-landish or 'cool'. Clothes had to work properly and protect me from the elements. That's it.
Then I realized: "NO! The body is like a canvas. Who wants to look at boring paintings? Fashion is fun! It affects how people react to me! Neat-o!"
Actually, that was more a forced recognition after one girlfriend had had enough of my bland & safe attire and insisted that I look cool in the clothes I wore. The thing which was so difficult at the time is that the entire world started to treat me with a LOT more respect when I dressed as directed. The fact that girls took a great deal more interest in me was not an insignificant factor my being willing to explore the whole thing further. Heck, peacocks have those ridiculous tails, right?
The big problem was overcoming the inherent shallowness of it all. My original position was that clothes, beyond their protection-from-the-elements aspect, are a lie, at best an effective tool to manipulate people. But then I realized, yeah, they're a lie, but they're also Body Art! And that's great! You don't need to shop at the popular stores; you can outfit yourself just as effectively, (if not more so), at the Salvation Army center. And if I walk around with the intention of trying to bring a fun and bright piece of visual appeal into the world, then I can live with the whole clothing-as-manipulation thing quite happily. And then a curious thing happened; I realized that it was not a manipulation at all; I really did feel like the clothes reflected who I was.
The fear and insecurity were gone, and the outward visual showed that quite honestly. Interesting!
Out of all the things in my life which were difficult challenges, this one seems particularly ridiculous, but there it is.
Anyway. . .
So yeah, every outward aspect of your being which people can see and which you have control over, will shape the reactions you receive, and an email name is the same way. A poorly selected email name will not serve you well; it's swimming against the popular tide without any need to do so. People WILL judge you either positively or negatively, and so you need to take this into account in order to be effective in the world. Rather than sweat over the unfairness of this, why not flip it on its ear and have some fun with it? You don't have to think of it as a negative thing if that isn't your intention.
In the end, clean up your innards, banish fear, and then have your outward impression express who you really are.
It's okay for painters to paint pictures which give people a positive feeling.
-FL
(work at Microsoft...
I read through up to here to see if anyone mentioned this aspect.
While it may be amazing that anyone still works at AOL, they do. I know some very smart and talented folks who work for AOL and have AOL email addresses.
While I generally attribute the, um, 'non-techie' stereotype to most AOL addresses...I certainly wouldn't discard resumes that list that....at least not until checking to see if they actually work/ed there.
If they never have, well, ok...maybe that resume doesn't get tossed but it may end up toward the bottom of the pile.
KM
Kinda like Moe, but just a little more Kool
If I were the kind of person that respects publicists, I guess an uncool email domain might affect my hiring. So please, all of you out there, make your hiring decisions based on stuff like that. I'll make mine based on experience and skills.
5 or so years ago, it was bad to have uncool domains. But the stigma around AOL has basically disappeared. There are plenty of professional people with hotmail, aol, yahoo, etc accounts. As long as your email address doesn't contain something offensive or weird in it, people don't longer care.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
But you obviously don't have a problem with poor spelling, grammar and style.
On the corporate systems I admin, almost all email coming from generic-type domains and ISP's such as aol, hotmail, peoplepc, etc., automatically goes on hold and is manually released after being given a once-over by real human eyeballs (the hold queue is checked perhaps once an hour, but could be longer). This is due to the greater amount of spam originating from these domains, and the lesser probability that it will be anything good. So there will definitely be a delay in the time it takes an email from one of these services to reach its intended recipient. Meanwhile, joeschmoe@betterdomain.com will likely sail right on through.
i have the exact same setup... i've explained it the great advantages to everyone else in my family sharing my last name, yet none of them were interested.
i think that stems from them not understanding what is really going on with the domain. they have to trust me to understand that, and they would rather trust an ISP... even though i do this for a living... not really sure, but they all argue "i already have email that works"...
firstname@lastname.com doesn't appeal to others as much as it seems to be the perfect solution to me.
It will affect your dating life.
It's free and has all the benefits of Gmail without the downsides of running your own mail server. I use it for my business and it works great.
(Although honestly I just forward it to my regular Gmail account and use Gmail's "send from" feature.)
Buy your own domain, attach a Google Apps account to it. The best of both worlds, truly.
This is Slashdot. Common sense is futile. You will be modded down.
I have a hotmail account and have used it for a contact for job applications for years. But the account predates even Microsoft's acquisition of hotmail, so the username is only 4 letters long.
Surely that would earn some cool points, like the low digit user IDs do here? :)
I once showed up to an interview for a sys admin job wearing a long sleeve tuxedo printed t-shirt. Later that day I ran into my landlord. He commented "my you're all dressed up. What's the occasion?" me: "I had a job interview.". Landlord "hahah...." me: "what?" landlord "wait... are you SERIOUS?". me: "yes, and I got the job too. you see they are looking for a geek, not a public relations wonk. It was best that they got the idea that I am the kind of guy that you keep in the back behind closed doors." I worked for them for years...
It depends on the position, for a programmer, we would figure he wouldn't know how to change it. But for a sysadmin that's another story.... (Just kiddin, well almost).
You do realize that is a porn site, or at least was...
I don't think it does matter, I've been using the same hotmail address everywhere and I've got a lot of job interviews. Sometimes though it seems that they are not serious about hiring me but I don't give up.
If you have a job offering for me, email me at HotNHugeMale88@hotmail.com and I'll let you know if I'm interested.
Out of curiosity, how would you look upon, say, firstname@lastname.dyndns.org?
How much would it depend on what page showed up at lastname.dyndns.org?
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
Wish I had mod points, mod parent up as insightful! I might be worried if a networking or web services company is using a generic freebie email address, but if you're judging how good a plumber will be in fixing your shower by how good their internet address is, you're looking at the wrong measurements of qualifications for the job.
Likewise, I like carpentry and if I was buying some new chisels or a plane on line from a specialist woodworking company, I wouldn't sweat if they had a generic email address or subdomain name. I'd be more interested in their knowledge of woodworking and tools and judge their value on that.
Exactly my point. :)
Note the slight change I also made to the username :D
[thinking] Given the current user, this might actually be progress :/
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
If it's a personal address, I don't think it matters. But I do consider addresses like CompanyName@isp.net or CompanyName_PersonsName@isp.net to appear somewhat unprofessional and indicative of an immature, unestablished business. Business addresses should always be SomeFormOfPersonsName@CompanyName.com, IMO. Similarly with websites like www.CompanyName.isp.net or www.isp.net/CompanyName, etc. These days, it's easy enough to obtain Web space and mailboxes @CompanyName.com that there's no excuse not to.
Downmodding is the refuge of the weak. Don't downmod, make a better argument!
> 'If I do good work,' she asks, 'does my e-mail address really matter?'
Spoken like a lame aol user.
AOL has always been for idiots.
The further you go back in time the bigger a rip off AOL was and the more virus like the AOL software was.
Anybody who _ever_ paid AOL a dime is a moron.
I wish there was a AOLer background check service available, I'd use it to filter resumes.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
President@whitehouse.com
Blah, this new AOL thing, I'll stick to my Fidonet address thanks.
Whoosh!
That reminds me, I have no local backup of my email. Better break out an IMAP/POP client once in a while.
Basically - the first one: if it's something professional, then that's okay. If not, it doesn't belong on your resume so it's points against you. Not a disqualifier, but you've lost some credibility.
The second one will give pause until I could confirm its a good address, and you'll gain points if it is your primary account that you've had for years; but greatly lose points if its one you are treating as a throw-away - e.g. you sign up for it until you get hired, then toss it; repeat next time looking for work.
The third is probably the most important - and I've had some trouble even with known good domains. But the point is - if I can't reliably get e-mail to or from you, then the account is worthless, and you'd better get a different account b/c I probably tossed your resume if you failed to respond in a timely manner to any inquiry. This is mostly points against you for what is seen as your lack of being a professional and responding in a timely manner. If the email gets rejected as a bad address, if your resume is interesting enough I might call, but don't count on it.
Simply put, your e-mail address does reflect on you, but as one of many factors. It does give a big first impression - but that's more the account name reflecting how you think, or how you respond to emails (which would be taken as a reflection of your productivity and work ethics by extension).
First impressions are a big thing. So think before you put anything on your resume. Doesn't matter what it is.
Truth is like the sun. You can shut it out for a time, but it ain't goin' away. - Elvis Presley (source: imdb.com)
throw out people with unprofessional emails or people who live to far away
Eye wood knot higher any on tat relied two mach on his spill chucker ;)
Free Martian Whores!
I work with a merchandising company that hires people all over the U.S. to go into department stores and stock shelves for specific manufacturers. Once the employee finishes restocking a site, they log into an online system to file an online report. Of the over 400 people employed by my client, the people we routinely have problems with are the AOL users. Either due to stupidity of the employee, or because the AOL browser keeps changing and filters or blocks them from some aspect of the report. Not to mention the problems sending email messages to AOL users, I'd love to force these folks to get a real ISP.
On top of it all, trying to work with the tech support team at AOL makes it even worse.
How the hell do you provide support to a system, if your stock answer is "I'm not sure how this works." Either the email systems at AOL don't generate error messages or their staff is clueless, but trying to find out why a text only email was "blocked due to content" seems to confound them.
I for one would like to see AOL die once and for all.
-Goran
Carpe Scrotum - The only way to deal with your competition.
IIRC I've got an old Scientific American in the stack in the the excrameditation chamber with an article on some of your bottles.
Are you the guy that made the nested Klein bottles?
I'm surprised there has ever been anyone with an AOL address that knew how to tie their shoes, much less had such interests.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
I usually send CV emails with a self contained html (inline css and images encode as base64) and PDF.
a friend of mine forwarded only the PDF to some hiring person.
During the interview I was told that my CV stood out because it was the only one which the CV was not in that weird format that when they opened showed up in word(!) with all those weird symbols.
since it was a heavy web frontend position, i assume everyone send in highly tweaked html resumes, and the hiring manager was clueless and when double clicked it, word was the default app, and openend it as text.
That person would probably rater an AOL email that she knows and trust than some domain exploiter using some hidden flaw on their own email server which alowed you@company.you.com... Or worse, thinking that companyhr@company.you.com was the HR that sent in the resume and that you didn't included your email there.
Which e-mail addresses do you consider "toxic"?
This lady seems to think that if she gets a new email address, her old one is gone. Why not just phase the new address in with any new projects?
Rightly or wrongly, everything in your resume, including your email address, will be judged by someone. If you don't want to spring for your own domain, and you're not embarrassed by the school you attended (it's already in your resume, right?), you can probably get a free alumni email forwarding account from your alma mater. The school has an interest in keeping in touch with you (soliciting donations from alumni), so I don't expect the account to ever expire, like other free accounts might.
I consider myself to be at the top of the web development game. I own over a dozen domains, and have quite a few POP accounts set up under them.
But I still use an AOL account. For two reasons. 1) So people from back in the day can still contact me. And 2) AOL has one of, if not the BEST, spam filters of anyone.
Seriously, all of my POP email accounts pull in at least a 1,000-1,500 spam messages a day. In Outlook it is so annoying constantly adding more rules, and right-click Add Sender to Junk Mail on 30 new messages that make it past the spam filters every day. In AOL, I almost never ever see a spam message make it into my Inbox. And rarely do I miss a legit email that mistakenly went into spam. AOL has the spam issue down to a science. And I like their news feeds.
Having said that, I don't put my AOL account on my resume. I give out one of my POP accounts, to appear more professional. But I still get made fun of by my buddies at the office for even having an AOL account.
I do think the standard nowadays for non-domain owners is to use a GMail account. I think people see GMail as the most "legit" free account, even in the IT world.
Such silly nonsense we worry about. =)
It's super-easy to point a real domain name to Google Apps for Domains. And the basic edition is free! I use it for all but my main domain.
> Complete lack of reliance on mail provider and ISP is the only way to be sure.
You, my good sir, are wrong. The only way to be sure is obviously nuking the entire site from the orbit.
I'm in the travel industry where a memorable email address has brought me plenty of repeat business over the years. In fact it's reached the point that I simply can't give up the address I use for business because of the many customers who can't remember the company name (having changed employers many times over the years) but they remember my email address and no it hasn't hurt my income at all over the years since I've had clients who've followed me from one business to another over the years and the only time I lose one of them now is death. Yep I've got many who still insist on using me because I am their travel agent and have extensive knowledge of their likes/dislikes/health that have an impact on where/what they can go/do.
To me, the important question to ask is how long has she had the address because just like with an contractor, once you develop a reputation, word of mouth might be the one thing that keeps enough work coming in to pay the day to day bills and for most reporters, that's exactly what they are. Paid by the submission and not on payroll. It also makes me wonder why her so called friend is so insistent that she change her address? Is it really to help or is it to sabotage a professional reputation?
Get with the times. AOL is spam mail central- I worry this person will end up giving my email address (unwittingly) to someone else. If it's a professional company they should have their own domain name (it's not expensive). If it's someone doing some side work then come on g-mail is a great free option. There are other good options - but lose AOL, Hotmail, and Yahoo.
I do not support "The Man". I also do not support your irrational stupidity
Some of this may have changed with upgrades to yahoo/hotmail/aol, but most of this Gmail was doing first and better. Also note that I had a hotmail address in 1995 I believe and used it for several years. I used AOL for an ISP for about a year in 1999. But I never used the email account because their normal and web client were horrible even then. I also used yahoo web client for about 2 years, before I got my Gmail account a year into its release.
Gmail in my experience loads faster, and lets you start doing your next task before the previous one is finished. I can press send email, and while it is sending in the background, I can start composing another email or looking at my next email. Gmail uses labels, and you can assign multiple labels to a message, instead of only being able to put it in one folder. Gmail message search simply rocks, it always finds what I am looking for, yahoo message search simply stinks. Gmail has applets where I can chat with other gmail or AIM users in it, and I can see my remember the milk task list, and my google calendar, and I can see what the weather is tomorrow.
QED, Gmail rocks!
I actually knew a manager who didn't hire someone with good qualifications because their email address, listed on their resume, was 2sexy4u@.........
Anyone who judges you on your email address is an idiot you can easily afford to ignore.
I caught it, I just thought if other people caught it as well it should have been modded funny. I just didn't have any mod points today...
OK, it wasn't willingly, but I can't complain. I used to be the biggest AOL hater back in the day. And now my "funny domain" Mail.com account, a leftover from the 90s, was migrated from Outblaze to AOL. I don't use it except for throwaway logins, but now it got a nice webmail interface and POP/SMTP/IMAP, and I couldn't have imagined myself ever saying this: Thank you AOL!
In Australia, welfare recipients need to show they are looking for work as part of the "Newstart scheme". My friend, not very interested in actually getting a job, would send his resume to potential employers with his email "the_lord_of_murder@[isp].com". It had the intended effect, every time.
"In the absence of the ability to establish the attribute of truth they tried to establish the noble attributes."
President@whitehouse.com would be better imo.
As a systems administrator, if I'm reviewing candidates for systems administration work, hotmail is an instant red mark, as are any other web mail providers who regularly show up in the RBLs.
If they claim expertise with email system setup and deployment and they have a private domain, I will happily check where their MXes are pointing and look for obvious third party providers.
I won't completely reject somebody off the bat based on their email address, but if it breaks the credibility of the claims of their experience or CV, I will hold it against them.
> circletimessquare
Add in a triangle, and you could aspire to be a Playstation controller...
Complete lack of reliance on mail provider and ISP is the only way to be sure.
Aren't you're still relying on your domain name provider?
I wonder about my tech friends when I see one has an aol address, but what concerned me more was when a tech friend sent out a message using his wife's email address. Having an aol address doesn't mean that you have dialup anymore, but using your wife's account when there are untold places to get free addresses of your own is completely baffling.
Neither did I, and there were some doozies over in the Pneumatic Tubes discussion :)
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
Why is gmail better than hotmail or aol?
I wouldn't consider the company good these days, but I would file them under 'less evil for now.' They do actively work to make their products better, and in very obvious generally end-user-and-developer-friendly ways.
The reason I use google apps (gmail) for my email, is because it has the most open API of the big free webmail providers. As well, the search is hands down the best. I also enjoy that I can apply filters to my incoming email that can process based on boolean logic, so I don't need to repeat simple rules with slight variations.
Finally, I can set up Thunderbird with IMAP to give myself offline access to my mail box. By caching my entire account on my harddrive, if google's servers tank tomorrow, I still have all my email. (I don't know their architecture, and with all webmail providers I've heard horror stories, so I think of any mail provider as potentially a single point of failure).
So essentially it's that I get the most bang for my buck. I know it's free, but it's the best free for me.
Most of my clients don't want to switch their email from their ISP to their domain, since they have no clue how to reconfigure the email client. And that's something I can't do for them.
I'd love to change the world but I can't find the source code.
I use Gmail too, but I feel I should mention that their IMAP implementation is a bit broken. I've done some email interface programming, and Gmail will generate the whole message on the fly for IMAP using the stored headers, message, and attachments. Generally this is a good idea because they can store binary attachments in much less space. In practice though, sometimes the attachments aren't combined correctly returned data is broken. (IE, the mime-type header will say the attachment is base64 and 5000 bytes, but there is only 3 bytes of plain text.) Note that the email accessed through the web interface is fine. I never tested this with POP3, so I can't comment on that.
I was doing data verification with about 1000 emails, and only saw the issue a couple of times, so it isn't easy to notice. This was also a year ago, so it's possible everything has been fixed.
Even my commodore 64 has it's own domain http://www.c64web.com
The problem with AOL and HOTmail is your name is gone and it's hard to remember dennis65427@hotmail.com
much better with your own domain@yourdomain.com
I wonder if in 10 years we'll be asking the same thing about a y@hoo account or those who have profiles or comments from other popular sites like f@book? I suppose it is up to the position to be filled. Does your applicant fad-followers have the right job qualifications to follow instructions or are you looking for those applicants that lead and think outside the box? Hmmm...
No. It does not matter for HER. Especially for HER. Note that she is a [freelance writer.] NOT a IT tech or anything related to technology. She WRITES using a word processor. If you are in a clear mind, I would choose the freelance writer by their writing skills, not their email address. Just read the article guys...
An AOL.com email address screams "I don't have any idea how to use the interwebs" to a good chunk of people. If you're in business, any of the free email accounts has bad connotations to a large chunk of folks (too cheap to buy a domain? moonlighting on your real job and not serious about it?).
Portable versions of Firefox, GIMP, LibreOffice, etc
Really, what it comes down to is a social assessment of a persons' technical ability and/or competence.
I'm a sysadmin. If I were to deal with someone with an @aol.com or @hotmail.com, I'd think a combination of the following things:
1) They're older.
2) They're technologically and/or socially conservative.
3) They're incompetent (when it comes to computers).
There's no technical advantage to using either of those domains for email; that's why they've got the stigma, and why people have moved away to other web based mail.
These might not be 'correct' implications, but the stigma is there, just the same - even though someone with an @live.com address wouldn't likely have the same stigma.
If I were a writer, I'd not worry about it so much. For most people, an email address shows nothing more about them than their physical mailing address (even if it's something stupid, like discgolfbum@hotmail.com).
If I were an IT hiring manager or something like that, hiring for a Linux administrator, an @live.com or similar email address would dissuade me somewhat from interest in said candidate. In IT, there is a degree of technical savvy which needs to be demonstrated in a person's personal technology choices - preferably pertaining to their expertise.
Meanwhile, those of us who have had our own vanity domains and host our email through that will never face this problem.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
So nobody sending mail to or receiving mail from me knows it's all done by Gmail.
Not to nitpick... but that's not necessarily true. You have to set your MX records to google's mail servers.
example.com. 14400 IN MX 0 aspmx.l.google.com.
However, I certainly agree with the rest of your post :)
Why, no, I haven't meta-moderated lately. Thanks for asking!
Repeat after me: "NetSol is no longer a monopoly."
I pay less than $10 a year for my domain + google apps.
What does this button d$#%* NO CARRIER
I don't actually care if somebody knows I use Gmail, and most people can't tell cosmetically from a received email (particularly as I use my own SMTP).
Of course if I really wanted to hide the fact that I use GMail, instead of mail directing straight to Google, I could have an immediate redirect from my non-Google-hosted pop account to my Gmail account. In fact, that's how I used to have it, before Google introduced the ability to specify custom SMTP servers and I migrated to using their infrastructure directly.
This is not a new topic; having an AOL email was considered lame, even many years ago (back when AOL floppies blanketed the earth)
Discriminating against someone this way even had a name: "Domainism."
As to lame reasons not to hire someone - especially with the economy in the dumper - I would recommend removing ANYTHING from your resume' or e-mail address that could be a reason to drop you in the circular file. As so many of you pointed out, they have to triage that gigantic pile of resumes' down to a handful anyway, don't give them any excuse.
In the "really bad hiring policies" dept. I applied for a tech/I.T. position once many years ago, and they requested a hand-written essay. (Wait for it!!!) After being turned down, a friend of mine on the 'inside' told me that they would do a hand-writing analysis on it to determine your 'quality.' I guess they felt this was more reliable than a palm reading...!
Would you dress on party in your oldest dress?
Would you come to interview in your jogging clothing?
It is definitely possible but most people will have prejudice against you. Unless you are famous, which is always reason to be weird.
To get an email address:
rivenaleem@atdot.com
First run through: I read the cover letter. If it's generic -- shows no customization for THIS job -- goes to the discard pile. If the cover letter has significant grammatical errors I read that as someone who doesn't take care over details. Pet peaves: incorrect use of homonyms (there-their-they're; affect, effect); incorrect use of apostrophe (plurals do not take an apostrophe) It goes to the discard pile. I tolerate the use of slang. I also like to see humour in a cover letter, if in context. (Anything to keep my eyes from glazing over after 30 cover letters) The cover letter filter eliminates about 2/3 of the applicants, and can be done by any good secretary. Now I'll look at the qualifications, sorting them in to three piles. The bottom pile is discard. If there are over 10 in the excellent pile, the middle pile is discard too. Now I'll send an email to the top 10 asking them a mix of questions, all things they would do on the job. This could be a mix of programming, problem solving, and workplace ethics situations. What I'm looking for here are people who are competent at written communication. The top 5 from this run are asked to come in for an interview.
Third Career: Tree Farmer Second Career: Computer Geek First Career: Teacher, Outdoor Instructor, Photographer.
According to Slashdot comments, this kind of e-mail addresses help to keep stupid people away. If you are applying to a software developer job for example, then it is your code that has to look nice, anything else is more or less irrelevant. If you somehow manage to imply that registering your own domain is a big skill, you end up in thedailywtf.com and not on a job.
It absolutely influences my first impression of that person... not necessairly my decision to hire / work with them or not... but definitely my decision. I work in the IT field (who here doesn't??). If somebody isn't savvy enough to migrate away from AOL, at least on the surface, there is a high chance that they wouldn't benefit my staff.
Actually I think I'd be fine with that. It shows a fairly good amount of effort was put in. On that note though, your mail server would have to have had all the effort required put in to make sure your mail wasn't getting dropped by every spam filter in the world in the first place.
Now from dealing with a service, if you are the entire business, then that'd be fine. If you instead are under a umbrella of a company (Real Estate firm, Law Firm, whatever), then your e-mail should STILL come from that banner, not be a personal e-mail. At least not for business related e-mails.
Actually I think I'd be fine with that. It shows a fairly good amount of effort was put in. On that note though, your mail server would have to have had all the effort required put in to make sure your mail wasn't getting dropped by every spam filter in the world in the first place.
I’ve just set up the account with Google Apps. Up to 50 free inboxes... 7411 MB of storage per user... :D
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.