Comments on: Do You Suffer from Email Domain Shame? Many AOL, Hotmail, Yahoo and Other Users Do

By: dot man

dot man — Tue, 14 Jun 2005 14:31:36 +0000

If you’re having trouble finding a good username, Hotmail recently enabled dots so there’s a good chance you firstname.lastname@hotmail.com is available. When you sign up, just ignore the instructions about only using “_” and use a period wherever u want.

By: deepend

deepend — Fri, 06 May 2005 18:05:45 +0000

I’ve lost count of the various email accounts I’ve tried over the years, but my main online webmail account is still Yahoo (.co.uk) which I’ve had for a number of years. Last year I signed up for their ‘paid-for’ service for 20 bucks (or 12 quid!) and so no tag-lines, ads, etc. Mind you, now they’ve upped the free service to 1GB, I may just go back to free. It’s integration with Outlook is my other main reason for sticking with YahooMail. (I think my Lycos account does this too).

And yes, I do have a Gmail account; plus a bunch of my own domain names (both personal and business) used in conjunction with my main accounts.

If you want free Yahoo without ads and 125mb storage, try MyWay.

By: DianeT

DianeT — Fri, 06 May 2005 14:02:07 +0000

Utterly absurd to discriminate against a job applicant based on an email address. My 20+ year career in I.T. doesn’t preclude my use of free and convenient email accounts such as Yahoo!. I’ve had a Yahoo! account for many years, it was free, it was convenient, and I could access it no matter where I was, and I used to travel a lot. Yahoo got far less spam than similar accounts I had on the old Excite and a few others that have gone by the wayside over the years. I have no less than a dozen active email accounts because I do post to a lot of tech support-type newsgroups and boards. Its fairly easy to figure out where some spammer harvested my email addy from.

While I do get a lot more spam thru Yahoo than I used to, its no more than the crap that makes its way through to my ISP-provided email. AOL, unfortunately, deserves the ‘low tech’ reputation that it has, but lets face it, there are more people with PC’s who get on-line than there are IT geeks like myself - and the majority of them fall into the AOL trap. For the technically clueless, AOL is all they need, although I’ve steered many family memebers AWAY from that provider for good reason. I also steer people away from Hotmail.. one of THE most-hacked email systems out there.

Not everyone can be a techie… but discrimination based on an email address ?? What is this world coming to ?

By: Aunty Spam

Aunty Spam — Wed, 04 May 2005 15:37:03 +0000

“Thanks for the pointers. Still, any chance you could make the ref URLs visible somewhere on the site itself? I frequently want to paste an URL into something like an email message or an IRC window and itâ€™s Just Really Inconvenient to have URLs which are significantly longer than one typical physical line in one typical window on a typical desktop (by an atypical user who doesnâ€™t maximize all the 38 windows I currently have open).”

Dear Aq, the /ref URLs for the top 5 stories each week are embedded as part of Aunty’s free newsletter. The /ref URLs for all stories each week are embedded in the premium edition of the paper, which is only $5.00/month. However, for you, dear Aq, Aunty now has a link to make a TinyURL at the end of each story. Enjoy! Kissy kissy, Aunty Spam

By: aqpatoq

aqpatoq — Tue, 03 May 2005 11:19:02 +0000

Thanks for the pointers. Still, any chance you could make the ref URLs visible somewhere on the site itself?

I frequently want to paste an URL into something like an email message or an IRC window and it’s Just Really Inconvenient to have URLs which are significantly longer than one typical physical line in one typical window on a typical desktop (by an atypical user who doesn’t maximize all the 38 windows I currently have open).

By: Aunty Spam

Aunty Spam — Tue, 03 May 2005 07:06:46 +0000

“So where do I find out what the user-friendly ref/ URL for a story is? What other Aunty Spam resources than RSS feeds and the site itself should I be using?”

Dear Aqpatoq,

Aunty is a bit confused, as if you are reading Aunty’s Net Patrol via RSS, or on the site, the length of the “meaningful URLs” shouldn’t be an issue, one wouldn’t think. Sites which carry some of Aunty Spam’s Net Patrol, such as Lockergnome, and Aunty’s newsletter, use the user-friendly ref/URLs because they end up being delivered by email, which is typically where a long URL will break.

Kissy kissy,

Aunty Spam

By: aqpatoq

aqpatoq — Mon, 02 May 2005 06:58:01 +0000

So where do I find out what the user-friendly ref/ URL for a story is? What other Aunty Spam resources than RSS feeds and the site itself should I be using?

By: F. von Blume

F. von Blume — Sun, 01 May 2005 17:35:09 +0000

I’ve been a senior project engineer for a number of years. I’ve had the last word on a number of new hires and I don’t recall ever giving any particular notice to what email domain an applicant may be using (or even, sharing). I might notice if Jane Doe was listing janedoe@microsoft.com and made no notice of Microsoft on her precis, otherwise the questioning during an interview should be much more specifically focused on actual experience rather than some anecdotal general observation(often wrong) of the skill level of the user based on their email domain.

I keep (and use) an AOL account -but I have and use five others - and whenever an associate sneers, my response is usually “You ignore AOL at your peril. I must watch AOL like a hawk.” Almost always, I get a sad shrug of agreement.

Also, my worry - paranoia really - is finding “Damn! I really needed that!” in the “Spam” folder rather than “Truly desperate housewives!” in the “Inbox.”

By: DannyF

DannyF — Sat, 30 Apr 2005 20:57:33 +0000

Very interesting that GMail accounts are seen as a sign of someone who is ’savvy’. I’ve just had my first spam from a Gmail account. Of course it was sent to my own GMail account, perhaps that’s the trick. I’ve got a sought-after @gmail.com address, so surely any email from a similar address must be from a frightfuly good chap, don’t y’know.

By: Spamhuntress

Spamhuntress — Fri, 29 Apr 2005 14:42:23 +0000

Yahoo mail is one of the few that can be accessed via WAP, so it’s highly useful. And you can forward your mail from your domain name mail TO Yahoo mail, and it doesn’t even break the spam filtering. I guess the trick is not SENDING from a yahoo address.