Poking around this morning I stumbled into this post talking about what your email address says about you. The “Who do you trust?” question hits everyone with an email address, but technical recruiters most often. I love the survey results, even if they did only survey their own members.
The graphic found later in the article made no sense given this graphic.
I’m old enough to remember when Yahoo was the source of all spam. Of course the source moved around over the years. It had a very brief stay on Prodigy, then moved to Juno (although Juno based spammers used to spam IRC (Internet Relay Chat) boards rather than email because it was difficult to be a mass spammer using dial-up). If memory serves, it went to hotmail next. At one point GMail even held the crown.
The fact fake email address generators not only exist but are free to use probably doesn’t help matters. You will notice that AOL doesn’t appear anywhere in this pie chart. You may also notice I didn’t mention the time when AOL held the spam crown because if you blinked you missed it, much like blinking allowed you to miss AOL entirely . . . assuming you didn’t see that movie.
Your teenage email address, like those keg stand photos you posted on Facebook, will haunt your career for all eternity. A consulting friend who used to have the email address toplessTA finally got rid of that a decade ago. He got it because his “toy” car was a convertible Trans AM. You can pretty much guess how everyone else saw that though.
Who do you trust? Are you going to open a supposed resume attachment from SexGod@YourHouse.com? How about WindowsCompany@statecollege.edu?
Logikal Solutions had to write quite a few respected titles in The Minimum You Need to Know book series to get trust globally. How much trust is your BigBootie1@aol.com address going to inspire when sending out your resume?
It was nice to see nobody respects (or trusts) an Outlook email address.