When my grandmother retired she wanted to rent out her large home in favor of moving into a smaller, more manageable house. She took a more casual approach to the application process, insisting that prospective renters meet over lunch to discuss lease terms. The first meeting was with a man who had flawless credit, more than enough assets to put down a deposit, the first two months’ rent, and a green thumb to help keep the property in check. He ordered salmon, and salted it before the first bite. At that moment he was off the list of candidates. My gradmother argued there’s no good reason (and a laundry list of bad ones) to salt a meal before tasting it, and “that kind of poor judgment isn’t setting foot in MY house.”
This kind of judgment often seems arbitrary, but she did have her reasons, just like prospective employers, partners, and clients have their reasons for judging you for having an @aol.com email address in 2009. If you still use AOL (or HotMail or YahooMail) and expect to be taken seriously as a business professional, good luck – let me know how that works out for you.
For starters, such email clients like Yahoo, AOL, and Hotmail have serious usability problems if you’re a highly active email user who needs solid filtering, labeling, forwarding, prioritization, auto-response, threaded discussions, and a host of other important features. And as for security, in early October, ten thousand Hotmail password/account name combinations were hacked and posted on Pastebin.com by an anonymous user. It was not the first time a huge hack like that will affect Hotmail and it will not be the last.
Another point of lameness is having to pay for “premium” features. Yahoo makes you upgrade to Plus membership (which is admittedly only $20/year, but no one should pay for email) to have access to the automatic forwarding feature, which is free on Gmail and indispensable to people who have multiple email accounts and want to keep on top of them all. Hotmail is a cesspool for unsightly ads but manages to make it up to the consumer by adding…wait for it…an audio player to the interface? Really?
But what’s actually more important is the personal, subjective distaste I share with many from the non-late-adopter fold for any email that isn’t Gmail or your company email account: it shows an utter lack of effort to keep up with technological trends. When you have an @hotmail, @yahoo, @aol email address, you are telling your important contacts that you don’t care to look for a better option, and that you fear change. This is even more of a red flag if your field is at all technical, as many employers admit to not even reading an applicant’s resume if she or he uses one of the aforementioned email clients. While Gmail obviously isn’t perfect in every way, it is light years ahead of its competitors.
Now for all the change-fearing, living-in-’98-still folks reading, don’t fret – switching email clients actually is very easy. Just sign up for Gmail, export all of your contacts from your AOL account or whatever other service you were using (look for the export to .csv option), and import your contacts into Gmail. Then set up your incoming email from the old service to forward to your new Gmail account. You can now respond to people emailing your old address, from your new Gmail address, and soon everyone will get the point and know to just email your new address. And most importantly, your important business contacts won’t immediately judge you anymore when they see an email from you.
I could expound on all of the awesome features that Gmail offers, but just take my word for it, it’s a far superior email client to anything else on the market, and if you own a business you can route your @xyzcorp.com email through Gmail too. And with that, you have no excuse to be behind the times anymore.
