what does your email address say about you?

 

About a month ago, I decided it was time to update the family histories for both the Brennan and Stenson side of my family.

Although I had printed material for both sides, the fact that it could not be easily updated made me decide that the histories needed to be in electronic form, so I published a couple of articles, and invited my cousins to send whatever updates they could - a process that is still ongoing.

I set up a Hotmail account sometime just before the millennium, and set up a Gmail account once I discovered that my employer (The Autobarn of Evanston) blocked hotmail from getting through. However, they did not black Gmail, so I set  up an account with them around 2006. About that time, I discovered blogging - which requires a Gmail account. 

Hotmail was started in 1996, and was purchased by Microsoft in 1997. In 2012, it was updated, and the name was changed to outlook.com, but messages sent to and from hotmail still worked.

Gmail, which is owned by Google, was started in 2004, but the history of email goes back a lot further - to 1971.

In 1971, Ray Tomlinson, a recent graduate of MIT, was looking for interesting problems to solve. He was hired to help build ARPANET, the precursor to the modern internet, and during his first year on the job he came up with a simple yet ingenious way to send messages between networked computers. He created an address system that put a user’s login name in front of the @ symbol and the computer hostname on the other side. Although the first successful test message traveled just 10 feet between computers, it became a technological milestone.

Tomlinson, who died in 2016, could never remember exactly what was in that first message, but in interviews he speculated that it was “something like QWERTYUIOP” — the top row of letters on an English-language keyboard.

What I like about hotmail  is that you can set up folders for a variety of topics. I probably have about 50, but some of them are dormant. As near as I can tell, the oldest correspondence goes back to 2004, when I was sending out emails from a cyber cafe in China. I pay Microsoft $1.05 every month to store things in the cloud, but I have no idea how to access the information.

A few days ago, I published an article about Skype, which is what we used for video calls before the advent of Zoom. In the same article, I also mentioned AOL, which used to be the most popular domain name. Although it still exists, it is nowhere near as popular as either outlook.com or Gmail. At least one of my cousins still has an AOL account.

Does it matter what provider you use for your email? In some cases, yes.

https://www.poynter.org/tech-tools/2021/not-so-hotmail-what-your-vintage-email-address-says-to-potential-employers-2/

The article above goes into more detail, but here are a few key points:

Sree Sreenivasan, a strategist with an accomplished digital resume, ignited a fierce debate on LinkedIn in January when he suggested that an email address that ends in @hotmail.com might be grounds for tossing out a job application.

“When you see a resume with a Hotmail address, what do you do?” he wrote. “Treat ’em same as others? Reject ’em right away? Some other response?”

Responses ranged from annoyed (“That would be the same as poking fun at a 15-year-old Toyota that is rust-free and still runs like new. It works, it does its job, and it’s mine. Get over it.”) to outraged (“If my email doesn’t get me the job, then I didn’t want it to begin with!”) to pointedly bombastic (“While you are on it you should track them, find them and put a bullet in their heads. That would teach them.”).

The furor demonstrated that not only are people using one of the world’s oldest webmail services, they’re zealous fans of accounts that some have been using for decades.

But does a Hotmail domain actually matter to job recruiters? What about other long-standing email services, like AOL or Yahoo or Outlook? Recruiters, hiring managers, lawyers and human resources experts we spoke to largely agree that it’s unwise for businesses to discard a job application because of a vintage email domain.

But it still might be time to consider a switch to something fresher.

Hotmail launched in 1996 as one of the first public webmail services. Originally stylized as HoTMaiL to highlight its web-based existence (HTML provides the building blocks for most web pages) and because mixing cases was inexplicably popular at the time, Hotmail offered everything that ISP-based email did not. Most notably, while its contemporaries were tied to a specific device, users could access Hotmail from any computer all over the world.

Around the same time that Yahoo acquired its main competitor, Four11 RocketMail, Hotmail went to Microsoft and underwent a series of rebranding campaigns: MSN Hotmail, Windows Live Hotmail and, finally, Outlook.com.

When Microsoft began encouraging Hotmail users to switch to Outlook in 2012, they used language like “upgrade” and referred to Outlook as “modern email.” It made Hotmail, already an ancient brand in Internet years at 16 years old, seem completely archaic.

That legacy is why some may see Hotmail holdouts in 2018 as people who lack technological knowledge.

Gmail was created by a Google employee named Buchheit in 2005 

https://workspace.google.com/blog/productivity-collaboration/celebrating-50-years-of-email

More than 30 years after Tomlinson’s breakthrough, a Google engineer named Paul Buchheit conducted his own experiments with email. In a 2005 blog post, Buchheit described the problem he was trying to solve: 

“My email was a mess. Important messages were hopelessly buried, and conversations were a jumble…I couldn't always get to my email because it was stuck on one computer, and web interfaces were unbearably clunky. And I had spam. A lot of it. With Gmail I got the opportunity to change email — to build something that would work for me, not against me.”

Buchheit created Gmail as a browser-based email program that allowed users to easily search their own messages. He wasn’t sure if it was going to be for everyone, but when he released a beta to fellow Googlers they were fans of its search and storage capabilities. And when Gmail launched on April 1, 2004 with lightning fast email search and a storage limit of 1 GB—500 times more than prevailing inboxes of the time—a lot of people thought it was an April Fool’s Day hoax.

Gmail is now part of Google Workspace, the integrated solution that spans Docs, Slides, Sheets, Meet, Chat, and more—and that’s home to more than 3 billion global users. Google Workspace is where people connect, create, and collaborate at work, at home, in the classroom, and everywhere in between.

Paul Buchheit wasn’t the only person getting a lot of spam in his inbox back in the early 2000s, and the issue of unwanted messages—from spam to phishing attempts and malware—has grown worse over time. On any given day, Google Workspace now prevents more than 100 million harmful emails from reaching Gmail users.

“Our machine learning models have evolved to understand and filter new threats, and we continue to block more than 99.9% of spam, phishing, and malware from reaching our users,” said Neil Kumaran, Senior Product Manager, Counter-Abuse Technology.

Creating a secure-by-design approach to email that respects the privacy of individuals has been a core principle for Gmail for years, yet our product designers continue to push safeguards to new levels. For example, Google Workspace recently announced support for the Brand Indicators for Message Identification (BIMI) in Gmail, which allows organizations to validate the ownership of their logos as part of authenticating email messages. BIMI provides email recipients and email security systems increased confidence in the source of emails, and enables senders to provide their audience with a more immersive experience.

Cyber security is a big business today, and cyber security professionals can easily earn more than $100,000 a year. The computer that I bought more than 5 years ago came loaded with McAfee software, but I still had to bring it to the Geek Squad at Best Buy to have it updated. I also had to buy a new hard drive less than a year ago.

Despite all the precautions large companies take, malware can still get through. About a year ago, the computer system at the Tucson Unified School district was hacked, which led the security team to institute even stricter protections, which includes a secondary verification process after you have put in your password. 

Most of us spend a little time each day either reading or sending email, but there IS one form of communication that will never go out of style, and that is the United States Postal Service.

Although volume continues to drop, it is not stopping any time soon.

The USPS processes both domestic and international mail, which can range from postcards, letters, and packages to periodicals and large parcels. According to the USPS, its network of over 35,000 post offices, branches, and stations processes an average of 622 million pieces of mail each day. This number includes an estimated 545 million pieces of domestic mail and 77 million pieces of international mail. The USPS also handles an average of 4. 9 billion pieces of First-Class Mail every day.

Beyond Christmas cards, most of us do not mail many letters, so it is time to do another experiment, by sending out some postcards .

It will be fun to see the results.

https://facts.usps.com/table-facts/