Craighton's Logic

What Your Email Address Says About Your Computer Skills

Posted by on Jun 1, 2010 | 21 Comments

Just a bit of humor for you today. Most of this is semi true but it can be left up for open discussion:

What Does Your Email Say About You?

Own Domain

  • Has a good chance at being skilled in what they do.
  • A good chance they are a programmer or designer.

@gmail.com

  • Probably knows their way a around a computer.
  • When the internet fails they try rebooting the router.

@hotmail.com

  • Uses some type of low end computer like an Compaq or HP.
  • Has issues with Spyware
  • Thinks MySpace is the ruler of the web.

@yahoo.com

  • Probably, most likely types in all caps.
  • Sends you frequent chain letters saying that your hard drive will crash if you don’t.

@aol.com

  • Prints out emails to show everyone.
  • When they tell you about a web site they go “ok go to… h-t-t-p colon… slash… slash… w-w-w dot…”
  • Before asking for help they say they are “computer literate” followed by some acronym like LOL
Original idea adapted from Matthew Inman
  • http://welcome-to-warp-zone.webs.com Reagar

    Harsh, i use an HP, and i have all of those E-Mail providers, I trust HP more than dell any way, they’re never let me down so far, only thing that i prefer more than HP is Acer for their aluminum cases or Toshiba for all their parts. And even then I won’t rely on any certain manufacture for everything, prefer NVida for graphics, WD for their HDD, that sort of stuff.

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    • http://thedigitaldragon.net/ Nephi Shields

      The own domain one has proved to be true for me (I am reading “learning ruby” and my primary email is on my own domain).

  • Joel

    I think you are a bit inaccurate on the Gmail and Hotmail ones. I think Gmail would be lower down or equal with Hotmail. I know quite a few computer-illertate people who use Gmail. I might be talking a bit more about a @live.com email address with Hotmail, but IMHO people that make the choice for Hotmail know quite a bit.

  • zbuckone

    The question is as ridiculous as the submissions.

  • http://internet-inspired.com Seth Warburton

    Excellent post, and in my experience 100% accurate!

    There’s one group you omitted, the throw-awayer’s. I see @mailinator and think ‘player’!

    FWIW, I have my own domains but use gmail to do all the load-lugging, handling my domains email, so I have IMAP access and push (a-like) email.

    @zbuckone – what question?

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  • http://www.runboard.com/blifewithdiabetes zolar1

    If anything, most ‘illiterate’ computer users have both a Yahoo email and MySpace account. They also have a low end computer.

    Other ‘illiterate’ computer users use the provided email address supplied by their ISP.

    I have used many different email providers.

    I just pick the one most handy for what I am doing.

    Yahoo does seem to have more of the visually appealing nuances.

    Hotmail seems more business oriented from the appearance perspective.

    Gmail seems, well, different so to speak. The best thing about Gmail is that you can use POP/SMTP access client like Thunderbird to retrieve your email.

    Hotmail and Yahoo want to charge you for that privilege.

    Anyone can get an email address from a personal domain. Just buy the domain name and set it up, quite easily. Just follow the directions given by who is hosting your domain.

    Computer ‘idiots’ are everywhere.

    If you happen to come across one, peek into their internet history. You will find porn sites, social networking sites, and other ‘cutzie’ type sites.

    From what I read on the internet, MySpace is THE number one site on the entire planet that is allowing the spread of malware. This is followed by Pirate Bay.

    So, with keeping that in mind, it would seem that all MySpace users are computer illiterate, and well as social misfits.

    Another way to tell if someone is computer literate is to see what operating system they use. Most use Windows.

    The more tech savvy the user, the greater the odds are that they use Linux and Gmail or Hotmail.

    I have found that most illiterate computer users have Yahoo & MySpace accounts, and do not know that they were to make a restore disk when they first got the computer, in case they had to recover.

  • Reid Sprague

    I think it’s more a matter of what’s newer – more tech oriented people will be closer to the cutting edge by nature – so I’d have gone with the rankings, more or less, a year or more ago. Not so sure now; and as time goes on and gmail gets “older” it will be less and less true!

    Reid

  • http://www.hawaiian-shirt.net Hawaiian Shirt Guy

    Make the email memorable by using what is already in memory.

    I have an email (not going to post it, sorry spammers) that uses the @ as the second letter.

    Some examples (again, not mine) are “B@rrel.net”, “F@tguy.US” or “Be@utiful.org”

    Makes it easier for anybody to remember.

  • PC

    While we all might like to not admit it, I consider this post to be very true. Debating whether someone is more or less tech-savy determined by Gmail or Hotmail is not the point here. The point is what tech knowledge a person has and who they choose to affiliate themselves with. Someone who has an AOL account I do not even bother asking a tech question.

    I realized years ago that email and cellphone are the most important means of contact for me, the only thing that I need on a business card. I decided that I was not comfortable with any free email account and I wanted to pay a company for my own server space and email account. I still do that today and have been using Midphase.com for years for my website server.
    This year however, I forward all my Midphase email to Gmail and that has become my main portal. If Google ever gets crazy though, I just stop using it by changing the forwarding options and no one is inconvenienced. Gmail has so many amazing options and as disclosure, I am a fan of Google and Android.

    Hotmail or Live.com = NO Thanks. MS already is in my life enough with an open pipe into my computer via Windows. That’s all MS gets with me and that’s enough. My phone and ereader go to Android.

    Yahoo = not even a consideration for me to rely on. I feel this company is more concerned about their profit then any concern for the people they service.

    AOL = censorship. You might as well start marching in Communist government marches if you use AOL because you are not experiencing the full potential of the web.

    This is all IMHO but those of you who know, know.

    Cheers,
    Phil

  • http://www.natrobius.info Nathan Davies

    Gmail users are by rule, more computer literate that anyone who stoops to the level of hotmail (a worthless, outdated webmail). My real question is what about those of us who have our own domain, but use Google Apps. (LOL) I guess we’d be kingpins for knowing how to set up the domain forwarding right?

  • Mihkel

    I use an gmail account :) I won’t be making my own domain any time soon because I’m 14 and I see no use of that right now. I think that gmail has a fantastic spam blocker. I agree with Craighton that the e-mail service you use talks a lot about you. I have never considered like using yahoo or hotmail as my e-mail service – simply because they suck.

  • Paddy Gordon

    I’m @msn.com and got a live.com address before they were released to the public too :P

    I think I have a gmail account but I never use it.

    I have an @me.com one too now that I think about it.

    Oddly enough I have a Quad core system with 8GB of ram and a 5970 as my desktop, and a MBP as my laptop… :P

  • http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100001150017782 Patrick O’Beirne Jr

    so true

  • maskell frank

    I’ve been surfing online more than 3 hours today, yet I never found any interesting article like yours. It is pretty worth enough for me. Personally, if all website owners and bloggers made good content as you did, the net will be a lot more useful than ever before.

  • http://twitter.com/KodeSource Doug McFarlane

    Ha, I agree, very interesting.
    Not quite sure how the toothpick / pi experiment is set up, but amusing.

    After reading this article I was wondering if current compression algorithms account for exceptions in patterns for better compression. Say a pattern is repeated three times, but the middle occurrence differed by one byte, does the algorithm still take advantage of this repeated pattern, but just note the one byte difference as an exception?

  • Anonymous

    Without order, nothing exists. Without Chaos, nothing evolves.

  • http://www.facebook.com/barry.etheridge Barry Etheridge

    Martin, I’m afraid that you have rather compromised your case first by failing to make the distinction between mathematics and arithmetic and second by failing to take account of the very distinct possibility that reality knows nothing of number. As Kant and other philosophers have pointed out what appears to be real is mostly a construct of our mental processes. It is hardly surprising that number is useful in interpreting a world which is in fact created in large part by number in our brains in the first place!

    As to mathematics proper it should be apparent from the very first that it does not describe the world at all. No triangle exists out here, for example, defined as it is by lines of zero width drawn between points of zero size and that’s even before you get into fractal measurements that show that every line actually drawn out here is potentially infinite in length!

    Mathematics is a logical system that just happens to be a useful tool in analysing and reshaping our environment. It is not in any sense complete (see Godel), unerring (it takes but a second to come up with examples of x+x=x out here), or accurate (if there is no exact value of pi there can be no exact value of any calculation involving it) and therefore it is a very poor candidate indeed for ultimate (or even non-ultimate) reality!

  • http://www.facebook.com/barry.etheridge Barry Etheridge

    I’ve always liked “50% chance of rain”, ie. either it will rain or it won’t! They pay people for that? Boy, am I in the wrong line of work!

  • Levi

    So what if you have an email address on all of those except for aol? I started with Hotmail because that was the big one. Then Yahoo got more space then they did so I went there. Then gmail arrived with a loooot more space and I went there. And I use them all.