What your personal e-mail provider says about you

[dhilipkumar]

What your personal e-mail provider says about you

Almost everyone has a personal e-mail account today, and which provider you choose says a lot about who you are and what you stand for.

@mac.com
An Apple fanboy to the extreme, you have either an elegantly designed tattoo of Steve Jobs on your body or an iPod pocket sewn into all of your clothing.

TYPICAL USER: Usually found in the hippest nonchain coffee shop, typing on a $3,000 precision aluminum unibody-enclosed MacBook Pro, white earbuds in proper position and iPhone 3G at the ready. And if Apple invented a laptop with a cumbersome wheel instead of a keyboard, you'd buy it. Fact.

@gmail.com
When Gmail rolled out in 2004, you thought you were pretty darn special because someone had invited you to use the free service and you could ditch your now passé @yahoo.com account.

TYPICAL USER: Thirtysomethings who are trying to feel as cool as twentysomethings and who also hate Microsoft (mostly because they think it's cool to hate Microsoft) and have entrusted entirely too much of their personal information to those "Do No Evil" Google guys.

@yahoo.com
Yahoo was such the place to be in the late '90s -- with its personalized portal technology -- and you loved having a nonwork e-mail account to do all kinds of secret e-mail-forwarding stuff.

TYPICAL USER: Non-IT industry worker who has been too lazy to sign up for Gmail.

@aol.com
Having that handle was da bomb in the 1990s ... and then AOL Mail bombed as dial-up service was left for dead by DSL and broadband ISPs. AOL has since shed millions of its former AOL Mail devotees who loved nothing more than to hear "You've Got Mail!"

TYPICAL USER: You fit one of these two categories: You qualify to have AARP's magazine delivered to you, and you'll be damned if you're going to give up your "granny1934@aol.com" address. Or there are those on the slightly younger side: Soccer moms who still run Windows 95 because their husbands, who have @comcast accounts linked to their Microsoft Outlook, are too cheap to buy a new computer, especially when "the kids will just ruin it with malware from Facebook."

@compuserve.com
A big blast from the long-distant past (think 1979, for its first e-mail service) that's owned by AOL ... and is very much still in business. Who knew?

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