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?"
Domain? No. Username? Yes.
This.
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.
If you're in DC, there's probably a lot of people with @aol.com e-mail addresses around who are competent IT people looking for a new gig. I tend to view hotmail as a bigger negative than AOL, honestly. If you've got a non-weird AOL username, you've probably had it for years and years.
A former co-worker had an interesting gmail username; it was his first and last name spelled backwards (i.e. resulami@gmail.com). Not a black mark on that one, IMO.