Indeed. Is one also required to use a new phone number every few years, or move to a new address? How about getting a new SSN, to “keep up” and not appear old? I suppose one could update their name, Tyler or Jared, instead of Frank or Bob?
It’s not about a new address so much as better… infrastructure, i guess. And yes, i get crap for still using a landline.
You’re going to be really upset when they start uploading our consciousnesses in October.
Same here. We’ve kept a landline phone for a couple of reasons: part of it is that cell phone reception in our area isn’t great, and part is that my wife just prefers using it.
A few weeks ago, I was on a video call for work, and our landline rang. One of my creatives on the call said, “Who still has a landline??”
I’ve got a Yahoo email address, and use it as my primary one. Mostly because I’ve had it for 20 years now, and it seems like an unreasonably heavy lift to switch everything to gmail or protonmail if the Yahoo one is working just fine.
I mean where’s the motivation to switch, if the Yahoo one works just fine? I don’t really care what people think about the domain part.
This was the jist of things that led to my OP.
I’m in the process of updating my resume, just for currency’s sake*, and hadn’t touched it since 2015. It still had my @hotmail.com personal address (which I use for business/non-family personal correspondence). I distinctly remember some “training” I had prior to retiring from the military (Sept 2015) where a Department of Labor spokesperson gave us “tips” on marketability in the civilian sector. He “strongly recommended” we don’t use ‘old email addresses’ that ‘dated’ the applicant, yadda yadda.
Fast forward to now (and being hired despite my ‘old email address’), someone who was helping w/my resume saw my personal email address asked me “Who uses Hotmail anymore. . .?”
Tripler
So yeah, it still happens.
I got similar advice when I had been laid off in 2011, and was working with an outplacement firm on finding a new job, so I started using my comcast.net address (which I’d had for years, but never used) on my resume and job hunting.
Yup, the fact that someone uses one of these old services does tell you something about them. If I were doing business with someone, it would tell me that they are probably a sole trader or small family business, older and not focused on technology. It certainly also carries baggage on a resume. Whether any of that matters depends on the context, of course. But you cannot just stick your head in the sand insisting that it “shouldn’t matter” and pretend that use of one of these email addresses is not part of the image that you present to the world.
All right. So i guess I’m a tech snob. But back in the day, when Yahoo and Hotmail were attracting lots of new users, those email addresses were looked down on by people who had email from…i dunno, more reputable sources. None of my techie friends has ever used an address like that as their primary email. They used a university address, or tiac or concentric, or…i don’t remember the providers, but there were a lot of services geared towards people who wanted a clean email interface without a lot of ads.
So Yahoo, CompuServe, and Hotmail have always been the “low rent” email district. Now they are not so much low rent as an indicator that the user is old. After all, younger people who didn’t want to pay for email got a Gmail address.
That being said, if all my friends had a Hotmail address for me, I wouldn’t change, either, because changing email is a huge nuisance. And hey, they are already my friends. It would be dumb to reject a friend over something as trivial as an email address. (And i do have non-techie friends with Hotmail addresses. Older, non-techie friends. But good people.)
I recently had a checkup with a career coach and this was one of the suggestions. About half of what she suggested was geared toward hiding my age. She wanted met to take the dates off my degrees, remove two of my degrees, and basically cut off my work history that is more than 15 years old. Funny thing is that if you looked at the “sanitized” version of my resume, I landed fully formed in mid-level technical management without either education or experience in that technical area. Was I a 21 year old recent graduate that was put in charge of a huge project with a budget of tens of millions and 100 staff?
She said having first initial + last name @yahoo.com shows that you must have gotten it in the 1997/98 timeframe, so you’d be at least 45 by now (I’m considerably older) and that will get you rejected by many hiring managers and even recruiters.
I asked why I’d want to work for a company that practiced age discrimination and she said that’s 95% of companies, whether we like it or not.
You can also ask, why does age discrimination exist? Because age is correlated with certain characteristics, such as being set in your ways or unconcerned about the way you present to others. It’s wrong to assume that all older people have these characteristics, that’s the definition of unjust discrimination; but it’s not wrong to reject someone for actually having those characteristics. Arguably, seeing one of these old email addresses is evidence of this.
For what it’s worth, I do have a couple of gmail addresses as well, but they’re ones that I set up for use with Android devices. I mean, I could switch to using one of them if I need to send out a resume, but for everyday stuff like where my bank sends me my notifications, or where my water bill notification comes, the Yahoo one works just fine.
I had a verizon account and still do, but I have to logon to AOL to access it. My email didn’t change though.
I don’t still have it for obvious reasons, but I could be reached at decvax!telemark. Not bad having an admin account on a backbone machine.
I still use a yahoo account, I’ve had it since 1994. It might suggest to people that I’m older, but if I’m applying for a job I want people to know I’m older. My experience is what makes me valuable, so it wouldn’t bother me that people assume that. Yahoo spam filters are pretty good, I get little spam on a 26 year old address; that’s pretty good.
If other people make assumptions about me based on my email address, I probably don’t care what they think.
Does this count as “almost infallible?” (I’m being serious, not sarcastic.)
My gmail account receives plenty of spam, but almost all of it goes to the Spam folder. I still check that folder about once per week, and very rarely is there a legitimate message there.
The main reason I consider Yahoo old is that their spam detection isn’t very good. Hotmail is a bit better, but newer accounts tend to be something like @outlook.com. I actually specifically chose an @hotmail.com address instead because I liked the idea of getting a new “old school” account in the 2010s.
Still, Gmail was better. I actually tried moving to Microsoft’s email when I got fed up with Google one of many times, but it just didn’t work as well. So I’m stuck on Gmail as my main account.
What else would expect a spam filter to do?
Gmail does get “false positives” from time to time (that is, wrongly classifies a legitimate message as spam). So I have to skim through my spam folder every day to make sure I’m not missing anything.
Also annoying is that there is no option to delete everything in my spam folder. I have to click a check-box next to each one to delete them all.
All deleted mail goes to the trash folder, where it is theoretically automatically deleted after a certain time. But that seems not to happen. When I looked at my trash folder, everything for years and years was still there. I’ve been working through that, deleting stuff dozens at a time.
I didn’t claim it was completely infallible. But I find it uncanny how accurate it is. I don’t think I’ve ever had an important message get a false positive, just occasional marketing emails from companies where I’m actually signed up to receive them.
Neither of these things are true on the gmail web interface. They must be issues with the app you are using.
I am not using an app. I am using a normal web browser interface (Safari) on a MacBookPro.
However, I did have my e-mail set to use a “Basic HTML” interface, and I run the browser with JavaScript disabled. Most everything works just fine as far as I am concerned, but that does disable a bunch of fancy-schmancy stuff that I don’t care about.