I’ll admit it- I have a strong prejudice against certain email address domains and even occasionally try to convert people still using undesirable domains.

I don’t know what this says about me (I’m sure it’s not entirely positive), but it seems that the email domain attached to your address at least strongly correlates to some specific profiles. Hunch.com gathered demographic data on 70,000 people, and drafted some general illustrations of what email addresses say about users. The gold standard indicated was firstname.lastname@gmail.com, Vice president of marketing for Hunch Kelly Ford explained:

“It makes it easier for people to remember your name, plus it’s more professional than something that mentions your favorite brand or has a series of numbers… Just like you would carefully pick out clothes to wear to an interview, you want to choose your e-mail domain with the same precision and think about the impression you want to make.”

Email snob fist bump, Kelly. Ford also expounded upon the common threads found surrounding certain domains. GMail users, the study indicated, tended to be more “wordly” males, who were thin, young and have gone places and done things. GMail users also tended to be liberal, childless, prefer digital to physical media (MP3s to CDs) and probably spend a lot of time in coffeehouses talking about locally sourced tomatoes. Okay, I added that last part.

Hotmail users, on the other hand, were found to be more likely suburban females of “average build,” who still live with mom, have a pessimistic attitude, and like “contemporary fiction” and desserts. Users with Yahoo addresses tended to be overweight females ranging up to the age of 49, who, by the general description given, were not at all worldly and frankly, kind of slovenly. AOL users were- is this surprising?- the bottom of the worldliness barrel, as well as older and fatter than all users of the other domains included. (The Oatmeal called this a while back.)

Basically, what you can take away from this is stop using AOL for email if you haven’t already. Christ. Also, if you haven’t jumped on the GMail bandwagon, it’s probably a good idea to try to claim at least part of your actual name for professional use.

Are you judgmental about email address domains? Would you trust someone with your business if they’re emailing you professionally from an AOL account?

Study says email domain stereotypes really do bear out is a post from: The Inquisitr

Users of Yahoo were unable to use the search engine this afternoon for the better part of an hour, and received the error message “server hangup” during most of the outage.

Yahoo-related services like Yahoo Mail and Messenger were seemingly unaffected by the “server hangup.” Reasons behind the downtime are not known, and Yahoo has not commented on why the services were briefly unavailable. eWeek obtained an email statement from Yahoo spokeswoman Kryssa Guntrum:

Yahoo was quick to respond — albeit by prepared statement — to the query from eWEEK.

“For a brief period this afternoon, Yahoo.com was inaccessible to some users. We have identified the issue and are working to correct it immediately. We know that this may have caused some inconvenience and we apologize to our users who might have been affected,” Guntrum said via email.

When the service returned, eWeek reports that the main page’s news stories were slimmed down from the average 32 pieces to four.

Yahoo goes down for almost an hour, reason unknown is a post from: The Inquisitr

Following a presentation by new Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz this week in which Bartz noted that Yahoo Mail was “becoming increasing critical to the company,” Hitwise compared data from the various Yahoo properties to see just how big a slice of the overall pie Yahoo Mail really took. The data shows Yahoo Mail receiving well over a third of Yahoo’s overall traffic, at 36.71 percent. The Yahoo home page comes in next with 25.48 percent, and the direct Yahoo Search page follows with 11.75.

Yahoo Mail, Hitwise also notes, is still the dominant Webmail provider. Stats from February put Yahoo Mail at about 56 percent of the overall U.S. Webmail market. Windows Live Mail takes 19 percent, and Gmail rounds out the top three with about 11 percent.

With that being said, Windows Live Mail saw a 25 percent drop in traffic from February ’08 to February ’09. Gmail saw growth of 88 percent in the same time period, while Yahoo Mail remained relatively constant with a growth of 3 percent from year-to-year.

Report: More Than a Third of Yahoo’s Traffic is From Yahoo Mail is a post from: The Inquisitr

Zimbra’s main selling points are its abilities to manage conversation-based threads as well as to incorporate tags into e-mail, to allow for advanced search capabilities, and to allow for the incorporation of so-called “Zimlets” — or third-party applications — into the e-mail client. As such, it’s been described as a Gmail-meets-Outlook type of solution, or a setup similar to an Outlook-plus-Xobni configuration. Its creators recognize the comparisons but say their program does bring something new to the table.

Client Comparisons

Like Outlook or Thunderbird, Zimbra aggregates mail from different services into one centralized, client-based platform. All three have IMAP capabilities. While Outlook is limited to Windows-based systems, Zimbra — like Thunderbird — is open source and available on Mac or Linux platforms as well.

The bigger benefit, its creators say, lies more in Zimbra’s ability to bring traditionally server-based options — the ones you see in Gmail — to a locally-based application.

“Until now, [things such as] search indexing have been a property of a mail server,” Zimbra co-founder and CEO Satish Dharmaraj told The Inquisitr. “We wanted to just bring that in.”

With both search indexing and conversation-based threads, Zimbra’s programmers see the common ground with Gmail. They point out, however, that their platform delivers the options online or off — and without you having to be logged into a web-based system.

“[It's] exactly like Gmail,” Dharmaraj explained. “Whatever Gmail’s doing on the server side, now we’re doing it from a desktop angle. You can collapse threads, delete an entire thread, tag an entire thread, or file an entire thread to a folder.”

Talking Xobni

So what about Xobni, the Outlook add-on that offers some of those same functions? The folks behind Zimbra are aware of the overlap but say it is not absolute.

“You can use Xobni on top of Outlook and get some of those things,” Dharmaraj told The Inquisitr. “But [it] does not bring the notion of conversations, does not bring the notion of Zimlets. You can’t delete an entire conversation that dealt with [a] subject, because that becomes a server-side operation,” he said.

The Yahoo Factor

There’s no question Yahoo’s influence and its competition with Google have played a part in Zimbra’s development since the acquisition. The Zimbra team, in fact, has spent the last year helping Yahoo play catch up with advanced e-mail functionality and deployment.

“Yahoo was nowhere in the scene — [it was] basically Google, Zimbra, and Microsoft. When Yahoo bought us, they bought an entry into mailboxes that are hosted by ISPs, by EDUs for students. We definitely brought them into those markets,” Dharmaraj noted.

Future Focus

Zimbra’s focus now is on finding ways to bring its features into the Yahoo Mail brand and begin expanding its capabilities.

“Search, Zimlets, conversation, and tags — everybody liked Zimbra because it helped in productivity because of those four things. What we’re doing is bringing those four things to non-Zimbra backing,” Dharmaraj said.

Projects in the works include an eventual full integration of Zimbra into Yahoo Mail, plus expanded options for synchronization — and what Zimbra hopes will be an online first.

“Later on this year, we’re bringing the Zimbra Calendar to Yahoo Calendar, so consumers will get probably the first CalDAV-enabled, iCal-enabled calendar client that’s out there,” Dharmaraj revealed.

“Hopefully — if Google doesn’t launch before that,” he added.

Zimbra Desktop: A Closer Look at Yahoo’s New E-mail Offering is a post from: The Inquisitr

The company says it obtained the domains to make it easier for people to get shorter and simpler addresses with the Yahoo Mail service, since every name imaginable is already taken at yahoo.com.

The new domains will function the same way as yahoo.com and will feature options of selecting “localized” versions incorporating your country name as well.

Yahoo Unveils New Domains is a post from: The Inquisitr