Does Using an AOL Email Address Suggest You're a Tech Dinosaur?

Nerval's Lobster writes: Despite years of layoffs and tumbling net worth, AOL seemed to get a new lease on life this week when Verizon bought it for $4.4 billion. But even if AOL's still alive, using an AOL email address has long been seen as a way of signaling that you're stuck in the 1990s. A recent analysis of Dice data found that a mere 1.8 percent of those registering for the site used an AOL address, versus 55 percent for Gmail. For the past several years, Websites from Gizmodo to Lifehacker have all declared that still using an AOL email address is counterproductive, to put it mildly. But is that actually true? Do the people in your life and work actually care whether you use AOL, Hotmail, Gmail, or a custom address, or is the idea of 'email bias' an overblown myth?

Comments

The Oatmeal

[alphax45]

http://theoatmeal.com/comics/e...

Re:The Oatmeal

[RavenLrD20k]

Aol users:

Keeping the
"h...t...t...p...colon...slash...slash...slash...dot...dot...com..."
joke alive.

So?

[SuricouRaven]

My dentist uses an AOL email address and a website that probably hasn't been updated in a decade. I don't care: He's still a decent enough dentist for the occasional drill-and-fill.

Dentists: Another reason why birds are superior.

Re:So?

[DeBaas]

on a Cobol devs resume however it's a good sign.

Re:So?

[Harlequin80]

Or that they have had the same email address for 20 years. Have hundreds of clients that have that email address and that sending a spam email to 5000 people saying "here is my new email address" is stupid and likely to cause them to lose business.

Re:So?

[Harlequin80]

But then you still have two email addresses you are giving out. Why bother? It's not like you wont get email if you use AOL.

Nothing I have seen gives a reason to change away from a service that is working for you. Gmail/other may be better at lots of things, but if you don't care about any other those things why change? This is especially true if your old email address is first.last@aol.com and the gmail suggestions are first793976.last63789534987435987@gmail.com

Re:So?

[Harlequin80]

I do work in tech recruitment. But also I don't provide a persons contact details to a company until they have already had a first stage interview. So a persons email address isn't available to the company as a selection criteria.

When I am determining whether I will represent someone to a company I care about their work experience, what they have done, and who they have done it for. I then interview them to determine whether I think the culture will be a fit.

My experience is that often in technical spaces people can be very unaware of how certain things may portray them. People put photos on their CV, they put their marital status, how many kids they have, where the attend church, whole paragraphs about their hobbies, all sorts of weird things. Quite often the more techie they are the weirder the stuff they put on their CV.

Part of my role is to help people portray their skills and experience in the way that will get them an interview. From where I sit, if having an @aol address is a bad thing, it ranks very very low on the list of things that will cause you a problem.

Re:So?

[Harlequin80]

Reason for leaving should NEVER be stated on a CV. It can always be misconstrued no matter what you write. "moved for a better opportunity" "approached by old manager" " poached by agent" no matter what there will be someone who reads that negatively. About the only thing that is ok is "Contract / Project completed"

If you are asked in an interview what the reasons for leaving were then you should treat it exactly the same way you treat the "So what are your weaknesses question" give them an answer which doesn't give them a reason to discount you and if you can manage it spin it into a quasi-positive.

If it was the case that your boss was a wanker and you had to get out, spin it into something like "I had spent a decent length of time there and I believe I accomplished all that I was going to. I felt that it was the right time for me to look for new opportunities and hence here I am. In particular I am keen to work on (whatever they just told you about)."

Nothing there is a lie. If your boss was a jerk you probably weren't going to go any further in that role.

RE: AOL email addresses

[loadedmind]

I've done a lot of side work for folks needing computer repair and every...single...one of them that had an AOL email were elderly and not technologically savvy. Personally, I don't care if they have an AOL address or not, but professional businesses not having the @mybusiness.com type of domain and having AOL - I personally find it a little harder to take them seriously and, for the most part, they didn't seem to have as much genuine care for the quality of their work. This should be seen as pure conjecture because I'm sure there are those that don't fit this mold. Just talking about personal experience.

Dear Slashdot Readers

[dullertap]

We here at dice plan to mine your data but it's an awful hassle to analyze said data. Please do that for us.

Re:What does it say about you?

[HornWumpus]

Nothing on the internet says 'I'm a blithering idiot, please abuse me.' as quickly and concisely as @aol.com.

It used to be worse. Now you are just a dinosaur. Before you were king of the chumps.

Re:Usual answer to a headline question

[HornWumpus]

Long time AOLers have been promoted to 'tech dinosaur' from 'king of the chumps'.

AOL always sucked, There were always better alternatives. Always.

personally

[koan]

In the instance of AOL, I am surprised it still exist, and then I begin to picture a little old lady that doesn't know any better than to use it.
When it comes to Hotmail or Yahoo, it's so cluttered I can't see why anyone would bother with it.

That brings us to Gmail, I like clean lines, simplicity, what I don't like is UI churn, so that just as soon as I get it in my head where to go to get something done... it moves somewhere else.

Like some never ending game of "Where's Waldo".

Re:personally

[tnk1]

AOL still reaches people who can't get broadband and need to use modems. Poor sods.

The thing is, unlike with broadband, where AOL was just some walled garden app and some content sites, with modems, they're actually a real ISP. And they're really the only national modem based ISP still in existence worth talking about.

You don't have to be a little old lady to be using AOL. You just have to live far enough off the broadband network to need to use modems still.

And as someone who worked at AOL itself not so long ago, no one was more shocked than I was when the execs announced that they'd come to the realization that while dialup was declining, it wasn't actually doing so in a precipitous fashion any more. When you take away the loss of all of the broadband adopters, AOL still had a substantial business in dialup, and their dialup infrastructure was paid off and/or low maintenance. AOL, due to its size, is the last man standing from the dialup age.

Dialup will eventually end, but it could take decades to finally drive a nail in that coffin.

Re:AOL.com = No Interview

[__aaclcg7560]

I had my Yahoo email address from the beginning ("Look, ma, no numbers!"), haven't changed my password since then, and still have recruiters calling me for tech jobs in Silicon Valley. Only stupid people discriminate, especially on the basis of email addresses.

I use them all the time

[Virtucon]

In my role as a professional phisherman and spammer, I find that using AOL and Yahoo e-mails enhances my target audience responses by 90%.

Besides, it's free and I can create hundreds every hour.

While I'm at it would you be interested in Penis Pills? I have a special on them two bottles for $19.99

Also please click on this link because I have important information about your Social Security benefits.

Horse hockey

[Snotnose]

It means you've had the same email address for 15+ years and don't want to change it.

The only reason I finally got a gmail address was I wanted to be able to keep it through moving, changing ISP providers, changing jobs, etc. Having a consistent email address is a handy thing to have.

@aol.com back in the day

[WCMI92]

Used to indicate that you are a noob idiot with PC's on the internet.

Now it indicates that you are STILL a noob idiot with a PC on the internet with gray hair.

Re:What does it say about you?

[omnichad]

From their marketing:

Unlimited storage, 25 MB of photo and video attachments, advanced spam filters, virus protection

I have no idea if that means 25MB per email or total for your mailbox. I'd hope it was the former. They support POP3 or IMAP.

Their current webmail client seems to be somewhat OK (if not cloned outright from Google and then had banner ads slapped in) - screenshot is over 2 years old:
http://venturebeat.com/2012/07...

I don't think it means they're leading edge in any way, but they're not lagging behind nearly as much as I thought they were.

Re:What does it say about you?

[sound vision]

The UIs in 1997 were often better than the latest text-free tablet-oriented junk. Not sure about AOL specifically, since I never used it, but everything from Google maps to Windows to Office to video games have had regressions in UI over the past decade.

Real men...

[BigDaveyL]

Run their own email server.

Re:Real men...

[FranTaylor]

wrong

real men pay grunts like you to run their email

I *only* use an aol email address

[NotDrWho]

It has a warm, true sound that you just can't get from today's CD's and digital music.

Re:What does it say about you?

[countSudoku()]

HA! You dope. I just crafted an AOL address THIS YEAR so I could bypass the other email hosting entities idea that my cellphone number is needed to verify that I'm a human, just so I could create a fake Facebook account so I can play games with my daughter without having to stoop so low as to have a real Facebook account. Mailinator was not an option, this worked out great and now I have an old-school aol.com address. I fucking make websites, I don't consume them. AOL is great if you don't want some free email site hounding you for necessary bullshit info, like your fucking cell phone number.

Compuserve

[jfdavis668]

So my CompuServe email address shows that I am old?

Re:What does it say about you?

[Anonymous Coward]

> I fucking make websites, I don't consume them.

Other than Facebook, and Mailinator, and AOL, and Slashdot, you don't consume them. And this lamp! The ashtray, the paddle game, Facebook, Mailinator, AOL, and Slashdot.. you don't consume any of them at all!

What's that say about those judging?

[modi123]

I have an AOL email I still use depending on the need, and use it as a barometer to judge folks I give it to. If someone balks and throws a douche-fit about an email address I really am not interested in dealing with them. It has not caused me to miss out on employment or side work, but the mild concern is there.

It's been my email for about two-dog ages, and I rather not run the issue of changing over everything that goes there.. monitor it for another few months for stragglers.. and then close it.

It's an email address people. I never had the cool Transformer's lunchbox, or nor the best Saved by the Bell TrapperKeeper and I survived.

Re:What does it say about you?

[gweilo8888]

You'd think that, but the websites he made were all on GeoCities.

Even AOL employees shunned it

[erikscott]

AOL employees used to have aol.com addresses. No one took them seriously, figured they were crackpots/frauds/walkoffs. So AOL started giving employees a corp.aol.com address circa 1997. Then folks would start replying to their emails.

I worked at a .com startup and this happened to us - got some interest from some loser with an aol.com address. Ran into him again at a trade show, and he explained he actually worked for AOL. And we didn't get the sale. Go figure. Did have a corp.aol.com address by then, though.

Re:Even AOL employees shunned it

[nite-]

As a former AOL employee - this is false. The corp.aol.com bit came around after 2006 - when company email moved off of aol.com and onto an internal Exchange installation. Those of us on the tech side of the business did often use @aol.net with internally operated smtp servers, however. In fact, it was very difficult internally to *not* use your "Business Screen Name" for official use internally - and that continued until after I quit in 2006.

Re:What does it say about you?

[chipschap]

This is so cool, I just went and got myself an aol email account based on this article!

The point is, sometimes you WANT to look like a non-techie. Great deception value.

Does using Facebook....

[gurps_npc]

Mark you as Computer illiterate?

It means:

you can't make your own blog, let alone own website

you can't master the concept of an email list to forward all your important news to all your friends

you can't find free games on the internet

you basically need to pay a ton of private personal information that you can never get back, just to participate in the internet - a task that technically literate people can easily do without paying that very high price.

AOL is NOT oldschool

[JustNiz]

From 71234.56789@compuserve.com:

That reminds me, I must get one of those new v.92 mod^D

Re:What does it say about you?

[LateArthurDent]

Nothing on the internet says 'I'm a blithering idiot, please abuse me.' as quickly and concisely as @aol.com.

I consider judging people based on irrelevant categories to be far more damning.

Shortly after gmail came out, every other free webmail provider upped their storage amount in order to compete, including aol. Gmail at the time didn't provide imap access. You could access your mail via the web interface or pop. Aol, on the other hand, did provide imap, along with a ton of storage space, which allowed me to check my personal e-mail via my PDA's email client (remember those?), instead of its horrible browser.

I had a perfectly technical reason to switch to an aol address while everybody was switching to gmail.

Re:What does it say about you?

[jrumney]

Get off my lawn! -- jrumney%slashdot.org%uucp.gateway.bitnet%NET.uu.uunet@uk.ac.earn-relay