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?"

Comments

Re:yes

[selven]

If you're trying to apply for a new job, is the employer going to care about what company you were associated with beyond trying to figure out why you left/got fired?

Re:yes

[tepples]

Why would you advertise AOL or hotmail, when you have a chance to plug your own site?

Not everybody has 1. the cash for hosting for a site and 2. the time to maintain one.

Re:yes

[Rockoon]

Sometimes people look for new jobs while already employed, and some never stop looking.

Re:yes

[WinterSolstice]

As another old Cserve person (11465,1123 - note the comma - later a dot when email became popular) I would say that any compuserve people who stayed post AOL buyout deserve to be singled out ;)

Seriously though - yes. Embarrassing email addresses should not be used professionally. This isn't so much hotmail or msn or aol (provider level, like the article is about) as it is the actual address.

I will *not* consider 'partyd00d420@whatever' for a job. Sorry, just not going to happen.

Re:yes

[AxemRed]

AOL offers free email, just like Hotmail, Yahoo, and others. You don't have to pay money for it.

Also, many people still using an @aol email may have originally had AOL back in the 90's and decided to keep their email address even after they dropped AOL as their ISP. I left AOL in 1999, and they let me keep my email address and AIM screen name... I still have them in fact, although I don't use them much. If I had used my @aol email address extensively though, I would probably still be using it. Why go through the trouble of changing your email address when you already have something that works and is free?

Re:yes

[Profane MuthaFucka]

Interesting that I am modded offtopic. Apparently people remember the "me too" posts, but they don't remember WHAT they were "me too-ing" all about.

For the newbies, the original posts were offers to email Alyssa Milano nude photos to anyone who posted on the thread.

Alyssa Milano was an actress in the late 20th century who was apparently very beautiful, and very young. If she did have any nude photos, they would have been highly sought after by many computer programmers.

The cascades of "me too" comments in response to these nude photo offers became legends, and after AOL connected to Usenet, became sources of sorrow.