Email Stereotypes - Personal

You’re sending out a resume with your contact information or an email to a client. Here are 8 email addresses. Quick, what’s your first impression?

pinlux@aol.com
pinlux@gmail.com
pinlux@hotmail.com
pinlux@yahoo.com
pinlux@me.com
pinlux@cypresscollege.edu
pinlux@facebook.com
pinlux@pinlux.com

Apparently, your email account says a lot about you. At the top rung of the tech savviness hierarchy is an address at your own domain and at the very bottom: AOL. Gmail, Hotmail, and all others fall somewhere in between.

I have friends that seem to change their email address more often than their underwear and it was a pain keeping track of how to contact them. I didn’t want to be THAT person so I stuck with just one.

My first email address was from AOL (sometimes known as AO-hell) and it’s still my primary PERSONAL account. Of course, EVERYONE and their mother makes fun of me for using it. Still, the benefit is, if you had my address 15 years ago, you can still contact me today. Even though I always give out the AOL account I still get mail sent to Gmail, Hotmail, yahoo, etc. Shows you how much people pay attention to your address.

Now, I have 14 email accounts and all of them get funneled to my email client. I don’t pay attention to what address you’ve sent a message to. Unless you actually look at my address, you don’t know what address I’ve sent it from either. So, seriously, what’s wrong with an AOL account for personal correspondence?

I have a different opinion about using AOL mail for business, but we’ll get to that in the next post.