When did they increase the size? Mine’s only six, but I was “early,” around 1996.
There used to be a way, through the Outlook account settings, to tell when you set up the account, but darned if I can find it anymore.
Tripler
I am darned, so sock it to me.
I would hazard a guess that once all the five-or-less options were used up, that set a de-facto minimum of six, even if it was never a policy. But now of course if you wanted to start a new Hotmail account, you couldn’t for all the anchovies in Norway.
If memory serves I set mine up at the end of the nineties, but it was more a matter of my brother telling me I needed to have one, and I spent no more than five seconds choosing a handle that happened to be five letters long, which just happened to be unclaimed, and it has served me well to the point where I brag about it on forums like this one.
Looks like you can still get an AOL email account.
But can you get an NFT of an AOL email account? 
I read a story that claimed Apple’s me.com addresses are cooler than mac.com or icloud.com.
First there was mac.com, and people were happy. Then Apple transitioned to me.com, and people hated it, because it was a change, and having a mac.com address meant you’d been using Apple products longer. After a short while Apple got rid of me.com, and switched to icloud.com, which is what new Apple accounts now get.
That meant that me.com was only available for a short time, and many people avoided it, so the addresses are much more rare than mac.com or icloud.com. Rare and unavailable = cool.
Doesn’t everyone who has a @mac.com email address automatically have the @me.com address? A quick test using @me.com indicates that it’s still an alias for my @mac.com address.
I have a very common name, not “John Smith” but something like that. I was an early enough adopter that my email is the equivalent of johnsmith@yahoo.com.
I had never thought about what message this might send until I read this thread, but yeah, “old and not enthusiastic about technology” is kind of my brand, so I guess it fits.
In the mid 1990s, I went back to school to work on my doctorate until my committee chairman left town. My e-mail address was my middle name at the school’s domain name.
It drove me nuts with all the e-mail that was clearly intended for someone else. For example, at the start of each school year, some incoming freshman’s mother wouldn’t know her kid’s e-mail address and so would just send it to his first name at the school’s domain name.
I kinda wish I had kept my compuserve address. It was only 4 digits.
But on the other hand I heard a quote recently about “seriously, he still uses email!”. So is it cool to be new or old?
I might as well wish I still had old letters from before zip codes came out. We didn’t even have an address other than the small town name, no house numbers and informal (and inconsistent) names for the roads. “Name, Town, State” was the whole address.
It doesn’t matter which email domain I use. Potential employers will estimate my age by adding up the years of my Job History.
Depending on which jobs I choose to show, it can imply several ages from 41 to 61. Actually, I’m over 70 - I got my BS in my 30s.
Side question: here in Germany, it’s absolutely standard that your resume starts with the basic data of name, address, phone number, email address and birth date. It also should include a photo. Is this not the case in the USA?
In the US, most people do not use a photo to reduce racial discrimination. It is illegal for an potential employer to ask an applicant’s age before hiring to reduce age discrimination.
I absolutely see the point, and that’s also discussed here. But doesn’t this become irrelevant the moment the applicant is invited to an interview, when their appearance and age becomes obvious?
You are correct, but it’s better than nothing. They also can see that somebody is in a wheelchair and many other physical aspects.
Do companies still have prospective employees fill out an application form? If they do, they’d probably figure it out from that.
Also if the applicant asked if the company would cover their Medicare Supplemental Insurance cost.
Or whether the lunch room offered senior citizen discounts.
It’s not only your age that your email address may indicate, but how tech-savvy you are.
My resume would quickly dispell that notion. If a perspective employer is stopping at my email address and not noticing my years as a compiler engineer, I’m pretty sure I don’t want to work there.
A lot of resumes come through a listing service (or a headhunter) which puts their own email, and besides, I tell my employees to make new emails just for this job.
~Max
Photographs are so abnormal here that some HR departments have a policy of instantly discarding any resume that includes one, so as not to be accused of looking at it. This is severe overkill (as HR types are wont to engage in) but there’s certainly no reason to include a photograph and lots of reasons to avoid one (unless it’s, like, an acting or modeling job).
The problem is you have to get through an HR layer first with bigger employers and can only guess at what arbitrary criteria they may use as filters.