Update to That Cultural Manifestation

Email hierarchy from TheOatmeal.com

For security reasons it's a good idea to change your e-mail address. Spammers and phishers will take months or longer to react, and your regular contacts should adapt in less than a minute. There's also another reason: both your old name ("PartyAnimal678") and your old provider (I'm looking at you, America Online) could be detrimental to your career:

Not everyone sheds their adolescent email addresses when they enter adulthood, instead maintaining allegiance to digital monikers based on the music, videogames and contraband they once held dear.

Five rules for setting up a new address:

Keep It Simple

Use a simple combination of your name—first and last, or initials if necessary.

Don’t Try to Be Funny

It’s Not a Numbers Game

add a few digits. But don’t go crazy... your email could look like a randomly generated spam account and be quickly dismissed.

Stay Off Drugs

the most common issue is inappropriate drug references—plenty of 420s [marijuana reference].

Move On From AOL

It might be ironic to send missives from @aol.com, but it doesn’t suggest an exceedingly tech-savvy candidate. Actually, “It weirds me out,” said [recruiter Mackenzie] Moore. “Why are you still using AOL? Gmail is definitely the winner.”

Other sites besides Google, Yahoo, and AOL offer
email, but I don't use them

For the record your humble blogger has AOL, Yahoo, and Google (Gmail) accounts, as well as accounts on three business servers.

I still use my AOL account for personal correspondence. Just last week I received a legit message from a former colleague whom I had not heard from for 20 years; I was the only person in our old business circle who retained the email address from that period. (Yes, I have to tolerate nearly a hundred corporate marketing messages a day, but they're easy enough to delete.)

I use Yahoo for business-related personal matters (for example, corresponding with my stockbroker) and Gmail for when I want to appear respectable (for example, charitable activities). If I were applying for a job, I would use Gmail.

We all have different masks we wear for different occasions, and email is simply an update to that cultural manifestation.