Posted inExperience / Information Technology

Who Do You Trust?

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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.

Lot of truth to this

The graphic found later in the article made no sense given this graphic.

Kind of the polar opposite of above

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.

Roland Hughes started his IT career in the early 1980s. He quickly became a consultant and president of Logikal Solutions, a software consulting firm specializing in OpenVMS application and C++/Qt touchscreen/embedded Linux development. Early in his career he became involved in what is now called cross platform development. Given the dearth of useful books on the subject he ventured into the world of professional author in 1995 writing the first of the "Zinc It!" book series for John Gordon Burke Publisher, Inc.

A decade later he released a massive (nearly 800 pages) tome "The Minimum You Need to Know to Be an OpenVMS Application Developer" which tried to encapsulate the essential skills gained over what was nearly a 20 year career at that point. From there "The Minimum You Need to Know" book series was born.

Three years later he wrote his first novel "Infinite Exposure" which got much notice from people involved in the banking and financial security worlds. Some of the attacks predicted in that book have since come to pass. While it was not originally intended to be a trilogy, it became the first book of "The Earth That Was" trilogy:
Infinite Exposure
Lesedi - The Greatest Lie Ever Told
John Smith - Last Known Survivor of the Microsoft Wars

When he is not consulting Roland Hughes posts about technology and sometimes politics on his blog. He also has regularly scheduled Sunday posts appearing on the Interesting Authors blog.